


A new beginning

by Rollina



Category: Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Asgard, Fluff, Helheimr | Hel (Realm), Hurt/Comfort, Loki Angst, Loki Feels, M/M, Male Slash, One True Pairing, Out of Character, Points of View, Protective Thor, Slash, Thor Angst, Thor Feels, Thorki - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:03:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 63,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rollina/pseuds/Rollina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/609847/chapters/1098751"><b>“Until that night”</b></a>.<br/>A strange, unexpected journey waits for Thor and Loki after the mayhem that led to the most grievous ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To let him go (Prologue)

**Author's Note:**

> This arc of my story starts from a very dark moment in Thor and Loki’s life, being the sequel to the previous part, [**“Until that night”**](http://archiveofourown.org/works/609847/chapters/1098751). Many crucial things already happened, and it would be recommended to read that part first, if you already didn’t.
> 
> \---  
> P.S.: because several times my digital art (I'm a fractal artist as well) has been stolen and I couldn't help it in any way, this time I registered this story under my copyright at the accountable Italian authority. Not because I think it's a masterpiece, or because I'm having mania of grandeur, but just because I'm consuming my life and mind and heart in writing it, and I love it so much that it hurts. So please don't steal it. ;)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor has to let his Loki go, to hope to have him back. And that is not an easy thing to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Being the sequel to “Until that night”, in this prologue you will find some references to the first arc of my story. Again, I recommend you to read that first, if you already didn’t, so that you can better understand everything.
> 
> The poem I quote in this chapter is “To You”, from “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman.

_Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,  
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands;  
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,  
Your true soul and body appear before me…_

The falling night was heavy.  
The sunset, burning the sky outside the large windowpane, induced to let the mind flow quiet, in silence. Towards oblivion.  
The poem he chose to read him while preparing him for his last journey sounded like a revelation. Again, he found himself speechless in front of the depth that poetry could reach dealing with someone’s heart and feelings. He couldn’t help but remembering that day, so far in time and space already, when he read his little one, laying blind and deprived of all his living force, that other poem from Midgard. He couldn’t help but remembering all they went through, in the name of what changed everything in their whole lives. In the name of their love.  
Their love.  
Their _inalienable_ love.  
That love neither of them could now live on without.  
“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;  
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,  
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”  
The perception of life going on anyway outside their room, outside their bubble of alienated distance, almost hit him with whippings of taunt.  
Because, in order to bestow that all that life regained its self-awareness after the chaos, in order to stop the chaos and restore all that life, his enlivening love, his Loki had to die.  
“O I have been dilatory and dumb,  
I should have made my way straight to you long ago,   
I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.”  
His voice, so deep, so hoarse, echoed in the empty plenitude of their room whispering those weighty lines, while his hand, delicate, tender, rubbed Loki’s petrified forehead, and lids, and cheeks with the scented sponge. He lingered on his frozen lips, after he cleaned them from the dried blood, his thumb grazed them gently, his mouth laid an airy kiss on them while murmuring that poem on, that poem that so surprisingly condensed Loki’s whole life.  
“…None has understood you, but I understand you;  
None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself;  
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you;  
None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you;  
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.”  
How beautiful his little one was, even in death.  
How precious, his talking skin wrapping his lifeless body, while the tepid water mixed with scented ointments dropped soft from the sponge along his chest and arms. _“Take him wherever you believe your home is, and grant him a worthy passage to the Afterlife,”_ Heimdall told him when he woke up on Jotunheim after Loki’s death. To him, home was no longer some unique, special place where to go knowing there he’d felt safe. To him, now, home was wherever and whenever Loki was. So, it made no difference at all. And he decided to bring Loki back to Asgard not because he actually felt his little one belonged there, nor to involve anyone else in something that was entirely his, entirely theirs; just because there, in their own private room, in Asgard, the air, the light, their bed, the pillows on their chairs, the books crammed in the shelves, even the walls fabled of them and carried their innermost intimacy, more than anything else anywhere else.  
“…O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!  
You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life;  
Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time…”  
 _…but when they opened, they opened on me, and made everything change_ , he went on in his mind, running the sponge carefully on his tummy, then on his sex, graceful, religiously. And there, he could not hold his tears back. Because not even at the very first instant it was just sex. Because since the very first instant it had been everything. And even if he knew he had the chance to get him back eventually, still he didn’t know for certain if it was really possible, nor how long it would have taken, nor how hard it would have been. Still he didn’t know for certain how long he could survive without that _everything_.  
“…I pursue you where none else has pursued you,  
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me;  
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others they do not balk me;  
The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.”  
On the border of their private pool, where he had eased Loki’s dead body down on a shroud he arranged from their bed’s sheets, he was now rubbing his little one’s legs, so smooth and rigid, and getting more and more nacreous under the scented balm.  
“There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you,  
There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you,  
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,  
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.”  
He stopped; his hand, by instinct, reached the enchanted dagger that never left his own belt since Heimdall’s revelation; the dagger that killed Loki, and that he cursed to Hel so many times before his eyes fell on the words carved on its blade; the dagger that carried the colours of that little lost soul that found in him the reasons to be saved; the dagger that now pulsed confident at his touch reminding him he had the power to recover everything.  
He sighed deeply, and mildly brushed Loki’s feet with the sponge, holding them gently under the heel, the right one first, then the left one, so pale, so cold, so fragile, so elegant in their frailty. And then he rested on his knees, staring at his pearly Loki sleeping his sleep of death.  
“…These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you;  
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they;  
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them;  
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.”  
With a sweet gesture he adjusted Loki’s hair behind his ears, keeping grazing his head, tilting his own a bit, cracking a smile.  
“…Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;  
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.”  
When the poem ended, he just clamped his mouth and listen to the silence. Never before that moment silence had sounded so ultimate, and in the silence he only heard his own heart beating. Alone. His heart, that left alone never stopped hurting, since the fatal instant he was compelled to thrust the dagger into Loki’s chest, and that kept hurting now, while he so thoughtfully attended to his dead body. That pain was fair and necessary, he needed to feel that pain, for going through it the whole hog was the only way to make the grief, and death, and loss _familiar_. The only way to become ready to let his treasured one go. And then, fates granting that together with the drawing strength of his will, and then to have him back.  
It grew more painful when it came to put some dress on him, knowing that even that was vital to make his trip the most comfortable, the most well-suited and meaningful, in respect of what in his life was most important, in respect of his aims and his desires. That he knew more than well, and because he did know he didn’t choose his battle suit, but a veiled light vest, green as his eyes, which he laced not entirely on his chest, and a soft pair of silk pants, smooth as his skin, which swathed his hips and groin and legs like it were his own hands caressing him. He wrapped his shoulders into a short furry cape, that shimmered like silver on a frozen lake, for he knew Hel was cold and he wanted his Loki to be warm, while waiting for his coming for him; in his velvety boots, made from black leather and refined with gold, he tucked his feet, slow, careful, almost as though he was afraid to harm him.  
It took him all the tears he had left to finish dressing him; and when he did, to stop and contemplate his aery beauty made him wish to join him right in that instant just not to leave him alone, and splinter any other thought into mere dust.  
He took his hand to his cheek, he closed his eyes, he dampened it with his crying, he kissed it softly.  
“Are you feeling alright, little one?”, he muttered sorely, and bent his head on his face to kiss his brow, while he leant his dead hand back on his chest, keeping his own on it. “Do not be afraid.” He laid his cheek on Loki’s, so that he could whisper right to his ear. “This won’t last long.” He breathed the new scent of his skin, that balms and death together made unique. “I swear you, Loki. This won’t last long.”

How many times they rode together on the shore along the Sea of Marmora, up to the little bay known to the two of them only, he could not count. One of their secret places in Asgard, those unnamed places that they treasured so much, that saw their love grow brighter and brighter day after day. Hidden and snug, never hit by the storms, always calm, that was the perfect place, he thought, the perfect place.  
Also that night, after straddling his dead Loki in the saddle so that he could hold him tight against his chest while riding, he decided to amble the whole distance along that shore, unseen, quietly, letting the night wrap them up and the little waves cradle their way. He had some stuff collected from their own room and life, things he believed most significant to go along with his little one and grant him the lightest of all journeys to the Afterlife; he had them put into a sack that now burdened his back with a stifling and painful load of memories. He never loosened his clasp around Loki’s cold body, holding his horse back to the slowest pace to make that route unending and have his brother there as long as possible. Loki’s head was endorsed on his shoulder, his frozen forehead brushing his neck, so naturally, so peacefully that nobody could tell that he was dead and not just sleeping. His skin smelled musk and grass, and the pale moonlight grazed it, enhancing its innate whiteness; all his limbs were following languidly the soft moves of Thor’s on his ambling horse, like he was letting himself be carried back home, pleasantly exhausted after an intense night of love. Only his arms, falling weightless and unbridled along his flanks, revealed his real condition.  
Thor kept his cheek stuck to his hair, feeling the instant he should have let him go getting closer and closer. Not once the thought of Odin, lost in his madness since the end of the chaos, touched his mind, not once touched his mind the care that Asgard was now lacking a ruler. His mind was filled with Loki, as were his heart and soul, as were his arms. Till then, even though dead, Loki was still with him, his body still real and palpable, his diaphanous face still visible, he could still graze it with the trembling tips of his fingers; but what would have happened then, when he’d have to free in fire the vessel of non-existence? _For how long I will not see your eyes smirking at me? For how long I will not hear your voice brushing my soul?_ What would have happened when he’d see it burning together with his little one, together with him becoming ashes, and disappearing beyond the final borderline? _For how long I will not feel your smile wetting my lips? For how long I will not feel you breathing under my skin?_  
While his thoughts were caught there, almost without him noticing it, his horse overstepped the last rock bottleneck and reached the bay. And his heart had a startle, as he realized.  
How precious that little masterpiece that he was sure nature set aside just for the two of them was, sparkling in silver in the soft light of the moon. How peaceful, the slight sound of the waves skimming the shoreline, how cosy, how… reassuring.  
The little boat that a few times they used to get lost over the waters was still docked there, almost waiting for them in the farthest nook of the cove, where a high sharp cliff kept it all safe from any possible trick of the sea.  
Thor restrained his horse and dismounted, careful in letting Loki slide from the saddle right in the warm alcove of his arms as though he were dealing with an artwork made of whispers. He laid him down gently on the sand near the cliff, so that his back could lean against the rock, he tried to drive his head upright, he stroked his hair, he froze staring at him; forcing his heart to focus on the future, that was murmuring his name right from his hands, he then stood up again, and struggled doing that like he was getting up after the most arduous battle he ever fought.  
He tugged the boat on the water’s edge, he took off his cape and with it he upholstered the whole inside; he picked Loki up with extreme care, with extreme care he eased him down into that fleecy womb that he wanted to think made from his heart, tenderly adjusting his legs, and arms, and head to make him the most comfortable he could. The words he wished to say to sweeten that fateful moment stayed dead into his throat, and he just lied by him, unable to stop grazing his alabaster cheek. _I can’t, I… can’t_ , he stuttered inside, slightly shaking his head.  
 _“You have to let me go to have me back, my sweetest.”_  
Loki looked so ethereal, pale like a severed dream wrapped in all that red.   
“I know I have to, little one,” Thor finally whispered. He grabbed the sack he brought with him. “I just hope these… will make your journey a least lonely one.”  
He felt like he was living an alternate timeline, a sort of reverie, while picking from the sack those objects he’d never thought he’d put as funeral stuff in Loki’s boat of death and that, instead, a few hours earlier he chose right for that purpose.  
“Your twin daggers,” he said, placing at his brother’s side the pair of blades he knew Loki loved the most. “I can’t imagine you facing a fight without them at your flank.”  
All his moves were delayed, and calibrated, for such a grievous rite needed all the time that he as a god could grant.  
“From your books, I chose this one.” His voice trembled, while he held the Aeneid in his hands and let his mind flow back. “Because I’ll never forget the day you told me this story, as I’ll never forget the day this story brought you back… to me.”  
 _…and I hope it will help you coming back again._  
“I could not bring here any of your magic powers,” he went on, raising a smile. “As I could not bring here any of the wonders that our making love is. But I know how much you treasure both.” He slowly took out of the sack a fluffy cushion, that he delicately adjusted under his head. “So I brought here this pillow I put aside from our first night. When you casted on us your sweetest spell to make our having pleasure… eternal.” He leant a kiss on both his cheeks. “It still smells of us.”  
A deep sigh, as he put his hand again inside the sack to pick up the last thing.  
“And this…” How heavy. “…this…” How heavy was that journal on his palm. So heavy it prevented him to talk on. He caressed the carved leather of the cover. The journal that he wrote for his Loki while he was lost in darkness. That meant more to him than anything else he ever did in his whole life. And that meant even more to Loki. He couldn’t help but opening it and leafing through the pages, while he felt his own eyes filling with tears.  
He stopped on the last page, where Loki had left his answer to his words.  
He read it all again, until the last few lines.  
 _“I’m leaving this notebook here for you to read my words, but know this, my sweetest: when I’m back, I’ll treasure it as the most precious jewel until the end of my days.”_  
He cried, in silence, he slowly closed the journal, he held it in his hands for a while longer.  
 _“I’ll treasure it as the most precious jewel until the end of my days.”_  
Confused, and caught in-between a rough flash of himself – was that a glimpse from the future as it was meant to be? - standing in front of his brother, alive again, and smiling, he secured the notebook in Loki’s hands right on his heart, grasping those hands convulsively for a while, promising him with his own life all the promises that time and space could carry.  
Again he kissed his brother’s clamped lips, a long, mild kiss he wished to last forever. Then, after looking at him for one more time, he stood up on the shoreline, his right hand on the fore, his left one grasping Mjolnir, and began pushing the boat towards the water.  
As the stern grazed the waves, a dark, thick fog started growing from the middle sea out of nowhere. Thor shivered. He moved some steps into the water, yet not leaving his grab from the boat’s prow.   
“The next time you will burn on a boat of death, in a thousand years from now…” he stated “…I will burn together with you.” Cold, the sea brushing his ankles through the boots. “And that boat will take both of us not down to Hel.” He took a deep breath, swallowed the tears trying to contain his anguished panting, and gave the little vessel the final shove. “That boat will take both of us into Valhalla.”  
As he let it go, the huge, gentle hand of the sea suddenly clasped the boat and by itself drove it off the shore against the tide, right towards the mist.  
Thor raised Mjolnir, slowly. He quivered. He closed his eyes an instant, on a task that for a instant he felt he could not bear.  
 _Do it_. His heart hastened its beating. _Just do it_. His breath turned into gasping. _For him. For us._  
And he aimed his hammer to the skies, calling for the lightest of all thunders so that it could touch his little one’s craft like a caress.  
It did.  
And all at once, the burning blew and illumined the night.  
“Loki!” he shouted in a rush of despair. “Loki…”  
Before his dismayed gaze, in a few seconds, the flames grew meters high and the mist blacker and blacker, the burning vessel was tugged on and on, relentlessly, until the otherworldly barrier shrouded it entirely and sealed its veil on it, making it disappear.  
Thor was still panting, and crying, and trembling, when as suddenly as it showed up the dark fog vanished, leaving there just the night and the moon’s reflections on the silvery surface, now flat as if nothing ever happened.  
As far as he could push his sight, nothing was visible. Not a sign of the boat, nor of the blaze.  
Nothing.  
Ages, before he was able to persuade himself that all was over.  
Loki was gone.  
In his depleted mind, no room for any thought.  
When he regained enough lucidity to step back to his horse, he just climbed on, he spurred the animal into a furious ride back to the palace and he locked himself inside their room.  
There, on their terrace, his gaze lost to the stars, _alone_ , he spent the rest of the night drinking ale until he was unconscious.


	2. Hel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hel is not an easy Realm to enter, and Thor knows that. But he also knows his one is the worthiest of all purposes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my depiction of Thor’s journey to Hel and of Hel itself I used canon Norse mythology as a source, but I added my own personal visions to it.

Empty.  
And cold.  
Wet from his frozen sweat after the nightmares that haunted him. Drenched with solitude and absence. Swallowing him like the jaws of nothingness while he tried to put his severed thoughts together. Smelling senses numbness, and obfuscation, and grief.  
That was how his bed tasted when he woke up, and it was only after his first night alone. His first night alone from time immemorial.  
They had never slept alone anymore since the first time they loved, not even a single night. Not even when Loki was caught into the magic sleep the Jotuns casted on him so many months before. And the few days when Loki had been abducted to Jotunheim, not even then those looked to Thor like actual entire days, because in fact he was forced to sleep all along them.  
The mutual habit to one another’s skin, and warmth, and breath, that had so soon became wondrously addictive, now didn’t let him face his renewed loneliness. What he feared the most, his inability to suffer the loss of the completing part of his existence that Loki had become, was now real and unquestionable, and as a consequence of that even his awareness of being the only one having the power to retrieve what was gone lost was starting to waver.  
Seven days.  
Seven days he should have waited in accord to the ancestral rite, at least to let his Loki accomplish safely his dark passage to the Realm of the Dead. Seven days that to him would have been longer than eternity itself, seven unendurable days. And who knew how many more, to properly arrange his own journey, a journey that required a peculiar and careful training.  
First of all, anyway, he had to force his mind clear, and unravel the knot of his devastated heart. He blamed  himself for not being able to think clearly, to look beyond the mere fact that Loki died, to seize his resolution back and act as the mighty god he was. But the storm in his soul was too far gone.  
He absently leant his eyes on the side of the bed where he was used to have his Loki sleeping, he grazed the sheets, softly at first, then his fist grabbed them more and more convulsively while he gritted his teeth and snarled his angst deep in his throat. And as the thought that it was Hel that took Loki from him and not Valhalla grew plainer and plainer, together with the meaning that it carried, his rage grew all along.  
Barely a couple of objects in the room were still intact after he gave vent to that rage; when he regained self-control, he realized his arm was cut and bleeding, and he was sweating, and panting, and random shivers were shaking all his body. That powerful, majestic body standing naked in front of the windowpane, that body that shouted its godly might through the perfection of its harmonious muscles, and that now looked unmindful of all its potential and just aching for the touch whose dearth became so soon overwhelming.  
“Look at me,” he whispered, his sight beyond the mundane glass in front of him, certain that Loki, wherever he might be, could hear his words. “Fighting ghosts and messing up myself just because I can’t bear a single night without you.” He smiled tenderly to the nothingness around. “Maybe I am a fool. But I don’t care. Because that’s it. I can’t bear a single night without you.”  
He took a deep breath over the sun already high and heedless in the sky, cursing that brightness that seemed to mock his feelings, cursing his own self for not having power enough to blow out that sun and keep it extinguished until he’d get his little one back.  
“I can’t think you in Hel… I wish I had not to wait so long to come for you,” he went on, following the thought that drove him mad. “For no-one more than me knows you’re the worthiest of all creatures.” He bowed his head, disheartened, grazing the glass with the tips of his fingers like he was grazing him. “No-one more than me knows Hel is not your place.”  
It was worthless to spend the whole rest of the day hunting across the Woods of Sigurd, slaughtering wild beasts almost with his bare hands; as it was useless, on the next day, to launch his horse in a mad ride that lasted hours across the Plain of Ida; or, the third one, just wandering along the bank of river Iving, pensive, and trying to reassemble the crumbled pieces of his soul.  
Every single thing he did, every step he took, every breath, he constantly could not help but feeling like Loki was there with him doing the same; finding out that he wasn’t, every time, was a renewed stroke to his mind clarity. During those seven days he could not even start to prepare his journey, he could do nothing else but respect the mourning and wait; and waiting meant thinking, thinking meant anguish, anguish meant grief. So, at the end of each day, no matter what he tried in order to unleash his angst and get free from his torment, he just longed for his… for _their_ room, for the dim where to obfuscate his sight and recall invigorating visions, for a stillness that could make those days flow faster, for some ale where to drawn his self-awareness.

That night, maybe the fourth - he didn’t care to remember -, the water of their private pool was warm and cosy, on his body and soul half immersed to find some rest. Just a couple of brazier were still burning, making the half-light so feeble and soothing on his mind sliding free across the borders more and more palely separating him from unreality. He carefully avoided everyone in Asgard during those days, as everyone – probably simply foreseeing how dangerous could get his devastation – did not even try to interact; he’d talked to Heimdall eventually, just him, because he knew he had to, the nature of his task required that. Eventually, not yet. And not that night. That night, his sense of missing was growing overpowering. Harrowing. Suffocating. The last time he took a bath in that pool, Loki was there with him. As always. He was there, with his winking eyes and with his sassy smiles. With the enthralling scent of his skin imbuing the water he sprinkled for fun against Thor’s laughing face, he was there with his unspeakable body all tense in finding always new and unforeseen tricks to surprise Thor and delightfully make him lose control.   
_It’s just a matter of days_ , he shouted inside, _just a few damned days, a blink of an eye compared to the eternity our lives are made of. The eternity that waits for us_. But still, he clearly knew that blink could kill him. The aberrant way Loki died, a way that involved the most powerful magic together with the ancestral hatred of the once mightiest of all gods, instilled in his heart the fear that _something else_ could have been planned to thwart his rescue mission. To prevent him from taking his Loki back. Making his loss definitive.  
He gulped down a swig of ale from the mug he had on the border and chased those dark thoughts away. He lapsed lightly into his warmer visions and closed his eyes, letting the water graze his skin, smelling _him_ in the lukewarm air around.   
_“You must always remember I’m part of you.”_  
Almost instinctively his fingers smoothed the braid skimming his cheek, the braid made with a lock from Loki’s hair and come true after the dream his little one sent to him the cold night of his death.  
He focused trying to depict in his mind the instant when, down in Hel, he’d finally seen him again. Yes. He smiled vaguely, keeping his eyelids closed, while more and more defined images took shape in the blurry disorder whirling in his head. He’d seen him turning slowly towards himself, then having a startle at his sight, then his eyes filling with tears of fulfilled craving, and his lips brighten from a sweet, disarming smile that would have enlightened his lovely little face and all that dark realm along with it. He’d run to him, he’d grabbed him in his arms and smothered him with kisses until they both were breathless. It was all so limpid in his mind, so tangible. He shuddered all across his limbs, for he could almost feel the soft dampness of his brother’s mouth caressing him, and the taste of his tongue, and the warmth of his breath.  
“I’ll never… ever…” he whispered on the ghost of Loki’s mouth “…let you go… again.”  
His breath hastened slightly, as the water became Loki’s fingers brushing his bosom, his arms, his waist.   _I need you here… so badly…_ And an instant after that same water was his brother’s lips that kissed his neck, and grazed his nipples, and glided along his tummy. _So… badly…_  His whole body quivered, painfully begging for that touch, and he slowly sprawled in the pool, rolling his head backwards on the edge. _You, here, on my chest_. Letting himself get lost into that living dream. So real. _In my mouth_. That touch. His touch. Almost unconsciously, his own hand followed that dream and became one with the illusion, into where anguish, rage, sense of loss at once melded together and were absorbed. _Between my legs_. He sighed. His hand, Loki’s hand, the hand of everything slowly reached him where he was palpitating desperately, and hurting in that tension, and ruefully beseeching to be driven out of control, right away, roughly, forever. Unwitting tears welled up in his eyes along with his erection, that he could not, that he would not contain, “Oh, Loki…”, he moaned, his hand going faster, his head burning in fire, his throat panting out his famished soul, “Loki…”, faster, his hand, Loki’s hand, the hand of everything, “…Loki…”, faster, on the whirlwind in his bowels, on the shivers in his bones, on _his_ endearing name, “…L-Loki…”, faster, and faster, and faster… and blue, and snow, and blood… and his name, his name, his name…  
His name that, so helplessly moaned along with his frantic hand chasing a climax that seemed to need aeons to be achieved, filled every little atom in the void around.  
And on his name, at last, he spilled his own heart, that melted down in the water, softly, between his trembling thighs.

***

“This is not the proper way to deal with it, Thor,” Heimdall stated, joining him at the coarse table of the dimmest tavern in the dimmest corner of Asgard. “Yielding to despair does not suit a god.”  
Thor just raised a quick glimpse on him, vaguely perplexed as every time he saw the All-Seer not wearing his helmet.  
“I know,” he answered, bending back over his umpteenth ale mug. He looked at Heimdall calling his own mug, sipping from it in silence and without turning his eyes away from him.  
He shook his head.  
“It’s just… I can’t manage the waiting.”  
“I see.”  
And again, silence.  
“Can you… see him?” Thor asked after a while, hesitant.  
“I can. But nothing more than a shadow, so I cannot tell you anything more. Hel is too a blurry Realm even for my sight.”  
Now, Thor was looking directly into his eyes, his gaze getting more and more fierce.  
“Hel.” In a fit of rage, he slammed his fist onto the table, making the mugs brim over. “Why Hel, Heimdall? He died saving us all, didn’t he die in honour? Didn’t he prove himself enough?” His voice grew louder. “Didn’t he go through enough pain already? Why must he endure also this… this…”  
Heimdall’s hand suddenly grabbed his forearm, powerfully, blocking it on the wood.  
“He _did_ prove himself, Thor.” The firmness in his voice and in his eyes left no doubt and induced Thor to calm down. “But he has to face a fate that goes back millennia. Hel was written for him since the beginning, and fates are slow and hard to be changed. He was a trickster, and as a trickster he committed misdeeds that fates cannot forget so easily.” He took a deep breath, preventing Thor from retorting. “I said. He _did_ prove himself. He _did_ prove he has changed. And this means that his fate is going to change as well.” He waited until he saw a glimmer of confidence sparkling back in Thor’s eyes. “Now you have a more urgent task to fulfil, and for that task a unique strength is needed. Not merely physical, insofar as even being physical it may be godly. Because Hel is not an easy Realm to enter. And because, as you happened to say already, your little brother’s death was not an usual one.”  
 _My strength is that strength_ , Thor answered that sentence in his mind. And felt the fire burning up his soul.  
“You seem to forget that, at times,” Heimdall went on oh his thoughts. “Moreover, Asgard cannot be left on its own forever. I am sure you know quite well what I mean.” He peered into Thor’s eyes. “And maybe you might want to pay your father a visit, eventually.”  
Thor scowled at him and measured his words, that came out from his mouth like from a vice.  
“I do not feel that urge, Gate-Keeper.”  
For a long while they stayed silent again, looking in each other’s eyes. They told each other more with those deep gazes than they could do with any word, and Heimdall did not reply. Too huge was the only one obsession in Thor’s mind to let any other seeds even scratch it.  
“How can I be sure that…” Thor resumed then, following the only issue deserving to be discussed. “…no other magic trick or whatsoever has been casted to prevent me from entering Hel and take him back?”  
“You cannot,” Heimdall quietly replied. “But you must think and act as though there weren’t any.” They both called for another mug, while in the noisy and unaware half-light they kept on talking of destiny of the Realms. “That will make _you_ the one able to prevent any possible trick to happen.”  
Heimdall leant over him, capturing his attention with his resolute gaze.  
“Now. There are some precautions to be considered before you start your journey.”

He left at dawn on the tenth day since the night he cried his heart on Loki’s boat of death.  
He left by horse, wearing a thick black cape that wrapped his whole body, hiding his hammer under the tails and his golden hair under the hood.  
 _“When the time comes, you must become one with the darkness and show no disrespect to it.”_  
He had Heimdall’s advices engraved in his mind and the excitement for being finally allowed to leave Asgard pushing him like a gale across the highland, until he was at the foot of the mountains that stood between him and the Realm of Alfheim. He held his horse back and rose his sight to the snowy peaks, breathing the air around, his eyes already seeing far beyond. It would have taken him at least three days only to cross the summit.  
 _“Before he can leave Hel, he must eat from the apples of Iduna to regain his corporeal substance.”_  
Across the bright lands of Alfheim spread the enchanted forest where, near the southern border, the fair-haired goddess Iduna tended her magic garden. She never overstepped the threshold of her abode and yard, for only she could tend the golden magic fruits, the shiniest in the worlds, and only she could pluck them from their enchanted tree; every day she used to leave a basket full of the precious harvester right at the boundary of her garden, so the Aesir gods could take some every now and then, and by eating them keep old age away. Why Loki should eat from Iduna’s apples as well, even though dead already, Heimdall explained to Thor: while still in Hel, the dead preserved the matter of their bodies, so that they could go through the torments fates sat aside for them; but no-one, never, not even gods could leave that Realm without losing their physical consistency, and nothing in a standard situation could avoid it, not prayers, not a spell, and not the golden apples of Iduna; nevertheless, Loki’s one was not a standard situation.  
Thor’s only thought right then, however, was that he had three more days ahead, five counting the two he’d needed to pass through Nidavellir and reach the passageway that led to Svartalfheim, and then from there to Hel - best case scenario – three or four even more; no-one could tell exactly how long took the last route of the way, because it changed on the reasons compelling who made the hazardous decision to walk it. Too many days still separating him from having the chance to see his Loki again; he shuddered with impatience, stating he would not take a break, not to eat, not to sleep, not even to let room to further thinking.  
He swallowed miles and miles befriended by his frenzy swallowing him, he rode and rode watching sunrise, sunset and night rise and fall over his head five times at least; as he arrived in Svartalfheim at the start of the Hellway, the endless road to Hel where only darkness ruled, the tepid sun was shyly opening its eye on the sixth day.  
How spooky was the landscape spreading before his eyes, in the dull light of the dawn. Svartalfheim was a spooky Realm itself, sombre, desolate, dodgy like the Dark Elves that lived in the convoluted depths under its surface; but there, in the right place where the improbable way to the Dead started, the sight was even surreal. Only the very first part of the Hellway was visible, surrounded by the never-dispersing fogs sprung from the ground; the rest disappeared relentlessly into the dark, engulfed into an endless, impassable black hole that let no sight, not even a god’s one, penetrate its bowels further than a few meters.  
 _“From the beginning of the Hellway on, you are not allowed to proceed except by feet; feel the darkness as a friend, not as a monster, and the way to the bridge will become short and easy.”_  
Shaken by a chill of apprehension, Thor dismounted and secured his horse’s reins at the black pole topped by a skull, scraped by the wind and stuck into the ground to sign the entrance; he wrapped himself in his cape and took a wide look around, before adjusting the hood on his head and hide almost his entire face under it.  
One thought to keep him alive, one purpose to fuel his strength, one aim to lead him, he moved the first step in and committed himself to the darkness.  
At first it was befuddling.   
Not only that blackness was impenetrable, unfathomable, burdening and distorting all his perceptive faculties; it was pulsating on his heartbeat, it was blowing arcane whispers at his ears, it was skimming him, and poking him, and shoving him with thousands flimsy hands. It was _alive_.  
He didn’t know how long he walked, nor which direction, not even if it was the right one, because he lost the perception of time and space as he was in; he just had the gut feeling he was climbing downwards. A torch would be of no use, Heimdall told him, for the only light one had to follow while walking in the darkness on the Hellway was that glowing from one’s inmost purpose. The worthiness moving that purpose and only that would have driven his steps straight to the road’s end, avoiding him from getting lost forever into the unending maze that darkness was.  
He had to call all his inner strength not to listen to the million voices around, all melted together in an obscure gibberish, unintelligible and yet clearly tempting him, mocking him, threatening him.  
But he knew his one was the worthiest of all purposes, so he strutted ahead, implacable, until an overpowering roar of water made him start running towards it.  
The roar was getting more and more rumbling as he ran on, and he gloated inside, for he knew for certain that he made it out of the road of darkness. Panting his own lungs out and disoriented from the deafening noise, from the resounding waves squirting iced water on him, from the sudden flare of the glacial landscape that opened in front of him after the dimness, he held his feet back just in time not to fall sheer off the high cliff.  
And there, for a bunch of seconds, he stared at the terrifying sight before his eyes.  
The river Gjoll, that with its impervious rapids surrounded the whole Hel preventing anyone from escaping that subterranean Realm, growled its eternal wrath right against his soul, intimating him not to step further. On the farthest bank of the river, still half visible because of the frozen fog thrown up by the rapids, made from the iced tears and screams of those for whom the fates stated that doom befitting, stood the limitless walls of Hel, whose end in height could not be reached by sight. Bewildering, and overwhelming, how Thor felt the whole burden of millennia of damnation cumbering his own shoulders, just because of the fact that he was there, contemplating it. No sky was discernible, because there wasn’t one that eyes could look up at searching for a hope of safety, and a furious wind shook everything around, whipping his face with a million frozen blows, making the cold unthinkable. The cold, even there where he stood, still far out from the main gates of Hel, was devastating. He shuddered, he coiled into his cape, his mind ran instantly to Loki. And he prayed his little one could wear his Jotun form, while being there, so that for him bearing that cold could get at least less dreadful.  
 _I’m almost there, Loki. Stay strong, try to hear me, I’m almost there._  
He moved fast along the rumbling river’s bank, more and more distressed when, after a while, he realized he could not see any bridge.  
 _“On the edge of the bridge there will be Modgunn, who will not care if you’re a mighty god or the last of the scroungers. To let you pass, he will ask you_ the question _. The same question he asks everybody trying to pass since millennia. A question that is never going to change. Be the most careful in what you will decide to answer.”_  
That Heimdall told him, he remembered precisely. But as far as he pushed his dismayed gaze, there was no bridge. Nor anybody he could recognize as the one who should be at the bridge’s guard. He gasped. _Did I do something wrong?_  
“Modgunn!” he shouted, trying to overcome the clamour around. “Where are you, Modgunn?! Why don’t you show yourself?!” He strengthened his grip on Mjolnir’s handle, panting after a sign that didn’t come. “I demand you ask your question!”  
His breath hissed between his gritted teeth, his stomach writhed, his mind cried out in rage, almost blackened by the crippling uproar. All the doubts blew in his head, all the dreads shook his limbs, _Did I somehow offended any of you, rulers of Hel?_ , for he could not figure out why he had been stopped. He growled against the rumbling water. Stopped.  
Stopped?!  
“Fine!” he yelled. _Stop_ was not an existing term in his current lexicon. “I do not need a bridge to trespass Gjoll, the force bursting my heart will be enough!”  
An instant before he called Mjolnir’s help to cross the river, a tall, evanescent figure appeared out from thin air on the other side, wearing a long dark vestment and holding a black spear in his right hand. An enigmatic figure whose eyes, that never blinked, were ice, whose face was glass, whose whole body waved into the fog and out. And whose voice, that did not sound as any voice Thor heard before, overpowered all the clatter.  
“Your heart bursts numinous fire indeed.”  
Thor froze, looking at him, waiting.  
“Nonetheless.” Modgunn glanced directly into Thor’s eyes, that stared back at him, fearless and proud. “Many brave hearts failed to pass Gjoll.”  
The wind screamed along with Modgunn’s arm raising the spear and aiming Thor with it.  
“You are Thor Odinson, the master of thunder.”  
Thor breathed in, unveiling Mjolnir from under his cape and gripping its handle.  
“I am.”  
“Your noble stock will not be of any help, nor will your hammer. Only your answer will.” The ice of his eyes seemed to glimmer with complacency. “Why would you wish to enter Hel’s domain, Thor Odinson?”  
Thor pushed out on the cliff, opened his lips, certain at first that his mouth couldn’t speak anything but worthy; right a second after though, restraining instinct, he forced his voice silent.  
 _“Be the most careful in what you will decide to answer.”_  
A turmoil of possible answers swarmed Thor’s head at once. _Be the most careful_. He quivered in hesitancy, as he wasn’t sure anymore on what could be considered worthy by the rulers of a Realm that existed only to punish the unworthy. Should he put above everything else the fact that he was there for Asgard’s safety? That was not the real truth, however. Should he tell him all the reasons for Loki had to be trusted as honourable? Perhaps. Should he speak in the name of his right to be king and by that right demand to have him back, because he knew he could not reign alone? That was not the actual cause compelling him either. He felt vexation muddling his soul more and more alarmingly until when, at last, the most simple, the most blatant, the most… sincere of all answers outshined any other one in his mind.  
“Because his loss will kill me.”  
His breath slowed down, because he felt suddenly sure Modgunn could understand that, behind the axiom that answer was, everything else’s fate was implied. For he was still alive just by virtue of the chance of getting Loki back from the dead. Any other possible option would not have seen him able to preserve his life from ruin. And along with his life, ruin would have prevailed on everything else, anywhere else.   
He saw Modgunn vaguely nodding and then moving his spear from him to the thundering river; sheet after sheet, a sparkling bridge of ice took form out of nowhere and joined the banks.  
“You may pass,” the guardian stated. “This bridge will remain here for you until you walk it back, if you will ever come to see that time.”  
Thor smiled at him the most relieved smile, while hastening his pace towards his journey’s end.  
“You bet I will, Bridge-Keeper.”

He almost didn’t feel the cold anymore when he finally arrived to see the Hellgate.  
He stopped behind the bulwark of the bridge, unseen. Before the immense gateway whose bars were made of black metal and which didn’t show any lock, a dark, gigantic hound laid nestled on the ground, sleeping.  
 _“While on your way, be sure you provide to get the heart of a wild beast from the Flaming Chasm to feed Garm with.”_  
Garm. He remembered Garm, from the time in the past he tried to approach Hel’s borders just for a crazy fun. He didn’t walk the Hellway then, he got there through the passageway hidden into Valhalla, stubbornly disobeying his father’s orders that forbade him to even think such a thing. He was young, and reckless, and oh, so arrogant, so… stupid. He always felt the urge to prove his strength beyond the line, driven by his irrepressible presumption. Punished at once, that time, because he couldn’t even get close to the Hellgate; Garm simply snarled him right on his way back and he managed to earn also a couple of bad snaps from those fangs. He smiled at those sudden memories, came to his mind he didn’t know from where, he smiled, thinking how much he had changed. How much his little one did make him change.  
While he was lingering on those warming thoughts, his smell reached Garm, that growling a big yawn slowly lifted the enormous head in his direction. Still hidden in spite of the rabid wind that, more and more whirling, seemed to have the power to lift him in mid air, Thor rummaged in his sack and grabbed the bleeding gift he stowed away days earlier. Before the hound could spread his jaws and jump, he threw it between his claws, distracting him and – as he swallowed the morsel that to him tasted more rare, and succulent, and satisfying than any other because of the place where it came from – making him whimper in pleasure like a puppy. Garm almost didn’t watch at Thor approaching, just rising his gratified eyes on him when he came to the gate.  
Only when he was close enough to touch the bars blocking Hel’s entrance he realized that was not ordinary metal. Though being incredibly solid in his hand, the gate was also trembling from some unknown energy pervading it; he could not see how high the entrance was, he just had proof there was no lock, no opening device, no break that could grant him a passage. He looked up to the invisible top of the Hellgate.  
“How should I manage to open this gate?” he shouted to the air above his head.  
“You feed our pet with a most relished nibble.” A husky female voice resounded around, covering any other sound, even that coming from Thor’s thoughts. “For that we thank you, Thor Odinson.”  
Hela, he thought at once, with no need to see directly the creepy ruler of that Realm. And on his thinking, the gate slowly dissolved.  
“We know your purpose,” the voice went on, while he overstepped the threshold. “Make your way into the great halls of Hel, and hope you can make it out as well.”  
As he was in, his mind had a stumble and his soul was sort of hit by invisible slashes of sorrow. The spaces were huge, the light was very low, a frozen, dense fog was moving all around him, carrying – he was sure about that immediately – the whines of the thousands dark people trapped in there. Stairs, arcades, more or less hidden recesses, corridors, all twisting in so many intricate paths that he felt suddenly lost. And everywhere, shadows. Shadows without peace. Along the hallways, on the steps, behind the columns. Some almost thin air, some more consistent, some looking like real touchable people. Some in small groups, some in couple, most of them alone. Chilling for the iced wind, while wandering unabated, while cursing, screaming. Weeping.  
His heart wrung in pain, as he figured in his mind the same torments afflicting Loki. Moreover, pale visions of the most painful moments in his life started to haunt him, making his capability to rationalise less and less lucid. Only one flash blew in his mind at once, as he realized how immense, how convoluted and crowded that place was. And he froze in anguish.  
 _How can I ever find you in this maze of despair, little one? How?_  
Inside the fog, meanwhile, the voices were taking shape, more and more distinctly, enthralled by the newness of his presence, making him startle and turn his troubled look from one side to the other.  
 _“Once you trespassed the Hellgate, try not to mind the goading of the dead, they are just hopeless; as long as you don’t care, though being vexing, they cannot be of any harm.”_  
They were sniggering.  
“The mighty god of thunder walking the halls of darkness!”  
Surrounding him.  
“Oh, did he fall from grace?” _…from grace? …from grace? …from grace?_  
“Look at him, look at him, lost like a frightened child!” _…a frightened child! …a frightened child! …a frightened child!_  
Scoffing at him.  
“The mighty god of delusions!”  
“The mighty god of tears and desperation!”  
Poking his back, and arms, and head.  
“Where is your bravery, thunderer?”   _…your bravery? …your bravery? …your bravery?_  
“You let it fall from your heart down in your pants?”  
Driving him mad.  
“How was it like killing the trickster?” _…killing the trickster? …killing the trickster? …killing the trickster?_  
Sneering.  
“Was it exciting? Was it fulfilling?”  
Sneering hysterically.  
“They say love always brings death along, don’t they?” _…love always brings death along… …love always brings death along… …love always brings death along…_  
Sneering unbearably.  
“Textbook, mighty puppet, father should be so proud!”  
On those last mocking words, Thor’s wrath exploded.  
“You miserable scum!” he roared, he swung Mjolnir around, scattering the fog and for a while all those presences together with it.  
Too late he remembered Heimdall’s words. At once, rumbling, immense, fluctuating over his head and over the whole place around, Hela showed up. Or better still, just one of her projections. In any case, furious.  
“Enough, stupid pack of doomed dogs!” she growled. “Would you like to taste more entertaining diversions?” She reached her hands out on them in a wide, rabid gesture, and made them spread around in terror. “Back down in your cesspool and mind your own pettiness, you lousy souls!”  
She then stretched out on Thor, towering him with her horrific head. Half of her face and body was a frosty giantess’, half was a rotten corpse; her arms were tentacles, her silvery hair were coils, and her monstrous laughter made Thor thrill, even if just for an instant.  
“And you.” She gritted her teeth and the complete blackness of her eyes sparkled darts of viciousness. “How do you dare rising your hammer on those who are not at your discretion? How do you dare walking inside our domains as you were the master?”  
Thor instantly bowed his head and widened his arms, sincerely regretful, because he did not intend to question her authority on her Realm in any way.  
“I did not mean to disrespect you, Hela.” And even less to risk to unleash her fury and lose the chance to get to Loki. “Please forgive my rashness. I swear that was not my intent.”  
A sarcastic chuckle distorted her face, while she slowly laid her feet on the ground and stood in front of him, letting her foggy mantle float sinister around him. She spoke right on his face.  
“You don’t look so sure about your intents, Thor Odinson.”  
Thor rose a fierce gaze on her.  
“Your words offend me, Queen of the Damned.” He measured his voice to make his following words indisputable. “If there exist something I could not be more sure about, those are my intents. Show me the shortest way to him inside your Realm, and you’ll get rid of my presence at once.”  
She sniggered, rising her hand to graze his cheek with her black long nails.   
“He is alone,” she hissed. “Anyone can’t be but alone in our domains, but he is more than any other. He is too alone even for Hel. He does not belong here. He does not belong anywhere.”  
“Except with me!” Thor shouted, unable to contain his nerves. _What are you playing at, Mistress of Darkness? Are you testing my tolerance?_  
“Tolerance is not exactly the first of your attitudes, thunderer.” She snickered again, mellifluous, her haggard fingers fiddling with his braid. “You claim his loss will kill you.” Her impenetrable eyes inspected that braid like she was dealing with something she could not suspect possible until that moment. “Easy for you to feel him, then.” Intrigued, and scornful at the same time. All of a sudden, she grabbed the lapel of his cape. “So, feel. Feel his loneliness.” Fizzling cold smell of ultimate cynicism. “His loneliness is screaming. Listen to it. Follow it. And you will find him.”

He never knew how long he walked the twisted warren of Hel from that moment on; inside the borders of that unworldly Realm, probably, time was nothing but a futile tantrum. In the right instant he decided to, he just knew how to dispose his soul to do as Hela told him and easily _feel_ the right way to follow; the tens of halls, burrows, clefts, and stairways ran under his restless feet like he was born and raised there since ever. By then, his eagerness and trepidation were grown almost uncontrollable; the wind, the cold, the unremitting presences around trying to provoke him could not even scratch his now lucid resolution, because he felt the closeness getting more and more palpable. And a vortex of now bright visions was keeping his mind busy: as he’d found his Loki and taken him back, a new future would lay ahead for them, and he couldn’t but shiver in mirth thinking of that. Just a thing was still perplexing him, the fact that nothing unpredicted, no magic trick, no spell actually got in his way since he entered Hel.  
That erased from his mind any doubt still alive on achieving his purpose and pushed his feet faster through the deepest core of Hel, where the light became almost non-existent and the cold hardly conceivable. Strange beasts stared at his passage together with the troubled citizens of that world, but he wouldn’t even give them a second look; he just ran on, until he finally overstepped a long arcade that led to a wide room, almost empty and nearly lost in the darkness.  
He stopped at once, panting.  
His heart juddered when, from the most hidden corner of that hall, what at first was a vivid spot of red, sole, breaking the blackness, captured his eyes. A second after, he realized that was his cape. His cape, that he put in Loki’s boat of death. And wrapped in his cape, as he got closer, he sensed him. Then he perceived him, and then saw him, distinctly. He gasped, he felt a knot tangling his throat at once, he tried to shout his name, he couldn’t. But it was him. Sat on a little rock with his back turned,  it was him, all alone, unaware, motionless; it was him, his hair moved by the wind, his head slightly bent towards the ground, as if through that ground he was contemplating the frozen abyss of his solitude.  
Thor rushed to him, “Loki!”, he grabbed his shoulder, he made him startle. “Loki…”  
A pair of huge green eyes turned on his face and flooded him, making his heart almost stop.  
Those eyes.  
Those eyes he imagined a thousand times oozing with joy, and tears, and cosmic relief in seeing him.  
Those eyes now frowning, instead.  
Surprised. Confused. Puzzled.  
Looking at him like they were not… like they could not…  
Loki’s lips quivered, his teeth chattering from the mortal cold, his ivory face seized by a mask of apprehension.  
The trembling words that soon afterwards came out from those lips drove Thor’s soul frozen.  
“Do I… know you?”


	3. Consequences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Because his death was not an usual one, there might have been consequences. I cannot tell you what exactly, for I cannot see that. You will find out only when you are there with him.”

At first it was just… panic.  
 _Of course you know me, little one_ , he’d wanted to tell him, _why are you kidding me?_ , but he stayed silent, because he perfectly knew that Loki was not kidding.  
He stared at him, befuddled, fighting inside between the compulsion of nestling him to his chest and a jumble of questions that couldn’t find an answer. After all those endless days of void he finally found him again. After all those endless days of void Loki was there again, again Thor could let himself get inebriated from the fragrance of his scent, again he could lapse on the sound of his voice, again he could fly away on the silk of his skin. And what? His little one did not even remember who he was? He searched his eyes again, unable to give sense to what was happening. Was that the final trick the Jotuns, maybe Odin himself had saved for them?  
 _“Because his death was not an usual one, there might have been consequences. I cannot tell you what exactly, for I cannot see that. You will find out only when you are there with him.”_  
He didn’t dare to move a single muscle.  
Consequences… He remembered Heimdall’s words, he remembered how concerned he felt when the Gate-Keeper spoke those words. But then, he had erased that feeling. The excitement from the journey, the strange encounters he had, the blinding keenness leading him to his target simply replaced any other emotion with the firing certainty of attainment.  
“…Loki?”  
Loki was staring back at him, curious, like he was trying to understand in turn what was going on; the look on his face exuded a pristine candour that made his beauty, permeated of such an innocent astonishment, simply… devastating.  
“That is… how people call me, isn’t it?” He was shuddering slightly and with no break, not really appearing to be annoyed by that, as though that condition was the only one he knew. “I heard them.”  
Thor bent on his knees before his eyes, that followed amazed even his smallest gesture, he carefully tucked the cape in around his shoulders; then he sat on the rock by his side, keeping his concerned look on his face. Slightly relieved, when Loki didn’t escape him taking his hands in his own and holding them tight to warm them up.  
“That is your name, yes,” he whispered, confused, touched. “Your name. You are Loki.” _Loki of Asgard_ , he could have told him, _Loki of Jotunheim, you were born from a king, you are a god_. But he chose differently. “My Loki.”  
The way that gorgeous man came from nowhere kept looking at him, so intensely, so desperately, those eyes so blue, that smile so warming, made Loki feel instinctively _reassured_ with no plain reason, and forced him to stay locked to that gaze, in awe.  
“And you?” So odd, how he mysteriously felt that he could _trust_ him, though not remembering to have seen him before. “How should I call you?”  
Around them, already sealed off into a bubble of arcane enchantment, Hel had become nothing more than a vague memory.  
“I’m Thor.” His voice trembled. “Your Thor.” So fatally clasped between eagerness and despair. _Consequences_. “You don’t remember me?”  
Loki blinked, sweetly disheartened, making Thor’s heart blow.  
“No…” He raised a shy little smile, not even knowing why he said the words that followed. “…but I am glad you are here.” He only knew he had to. “Nobody here ever comes close to me.”  
The soft resignation blended with a candid wave of wonder in his voice wrapped Thor’s soul in a silky blanket of tenderness, and he had to force himself to hold tears back.  
 _Because his death was not an usual one…_  
Blurry in his mind, at first, flashes of the unique circumstances that led to Loki’s death. More and more logic, then. More and more obvious.  
 _…there might have been consequences._  
Of course, how could that not occur to him immediately?  
 _Consequences._  
At once, on the disarming pureness effusing from Loki’s eyes, Thor put the tiles together. The dagger. The dagger that never left his belt since that damned day. The magic dagger that killed his little one, sucked away his whole essence together with his life. And now what was left of his Loki was nothing but an empty shell. A rare, helpless shell waiting for him to be refilled with all the wonders that made it his unrivalled Loki. That was the real reason why Heimdall told him to take his best care of that dagger. By all the gods, that was. He felt a sudden rush of relief warming his soul. How could he do that then, he still didn’t know, but now that was not the first issue; now, knowing that he would eventually, when the right time had come, was enough to revive inside him unlimited confidence.  
“Oh, Loki…”  
It took him a whole life to rise his hand and graze that cherished cheek, overwhelmed by those quizzical eyes captured in looking at him, those eyes catching a sparkle of an entire, unknown universe that they sensed through his ones but that they were no more able to name.  
Loki tilted his head a bit, getting more and more accustomed to the warmth of Thor’s palm.  
“You’re looking at me…” he whispered, intrigued “…as if I were something… precious…”  
Thor’s smile shined in the dark, crumbling any possible doubt.  
“You are. More precious than anything else in my life.”  
Along with Thor smiling, smiled Loki’s eyes, and smiled his little face, while a sort of childish cheerfulness brightened it as though for the first time in his existence he heard words that delightful.  
“…am I?”  
Thor ran his fingers through his hair, smoothly, just that, not to rush things in any way. Loki’s clear joy, in all its innocence, sufficed profusely to make him feel better than ever.  
“Yes, little one, you are.” His thumb brushed the silk of his skin right below his eyelid. “You will always be.”  
Loki couldn’t tell how, but he knew that was true. And his curiosity grew together with his confidence, so he moved slightly on his rocky seat to get closer to Thor, instinctively searching for a contact, yet just a shy touch between their bodies, but so spontaneous that Thor shivered with endless fondness.  
Huddling up in the cape, Loki swamped the blue of Thor’s eyes with his thirst for discovering more.  
“How are we… related?”  
Craving to satisfy that thirst, Thor delved into his own heart to dig out the most fitting words he had power on.  
“We were raised as brothers, but actually we are not.” His voice sounded like a caressing hand to Loki’s maimed soul. “We were friends, and we were enemies. We almost lost each other.” His look was the quintessence of transparency. “Until that night.” He quivered in his bones while saying those words. “When we found each other again.” He melted in endearment when he felt Loki quivering along. “And became one.”  
Loki just stayed silent, trapped into his gaze, unable to give form to the cluster of unidentifiable feelings those words were awakening inside him. Still so unbearably, so completely lost into the fogs of oblivion.  
Thor caught his vexation.  
“You… don’t remember, do you?”  
Loki shook his head, timidly pressing himself against Thor’s arm. Again, Thor searched for his eyes, to flood them with reassurance.  
“What… what do you remember? Before being here?”  
“Nothing.” Loki bent his head in dismay, looking at his own feet. “I… I have always been here.”  
On the ground right at a side of his little one’s feet, muddled with the darkness around, Thor noticed just then, laid his journal. He picked it up, he held it in his hand, while Loki raised a vague gaze on it.  
“I don’t know what’s inside it,” Loki murmured. “I cannot open it. I never could.”  
Thor frowned, trying to lift the cover, puzzled when he discovered he was not able either. _What kind of preposterous trick is that, now?_ , he thought. But there were more urgent things to take care of, so he let go and stowed the precious notebook into his sack, purposing to solve that riddle once back in Asgard.  
“I know what’s inside it, instead,” he said, smiling. “As I know you haven’t always been here.” He put his arm around his brother’s shoulders, cuddling him mildly. “I am sure everything will come back to your memory, when we are back home.”  
Loki opened his eyes wide on him.  
“…home?” Bewildered. “Isn’t this place… home?”  
“No, little one.” Thor had to restrain himself from closing that trembling mouth with the deepest, the sweetest kiss he could ever lay on it. “This is just a doomed place where you never belonged.”  
And right in the moment he said that, he felt inside the urge of hurrying their way back regrowing irrepressible. Before Loki’s baffled eyes he picked from his sack one of the golden apples he brought from Iduna’s garden, he put it in his brother’s hands and closed them delicately around it. The prodigious fruit glimmered through the splits between Loki’s fingers, inducing on his face an incredulous, surprised look. He held the apple on his palm, letting it glisten before his eyes, fascinated.  
“Taste it,” Thor whispered sweetly on his hesitance. He gently pushed his brother’s hand holding the apple closer to his mouth. “Come on, little one. You trust me, don’t you? Just taste it.”  
Convinced at last, Loki apposed his lips to the golden peel, that shined over his face, his teeth skimmed it, then with a soft pressure sank into the pulp making a crispy, cute little sound. Thor stared at him, in bliss. Oh, how unconsciously sensual his mouth was, biting the shining fruit. Morsel after morsel, it was like Loki ate the apple’s magic light together with the pulp until, when the essential need of his body had clearly been filled, what was left of the fruit dissolved into a thin, glowing dust that fluctuated for a while in mid air and vanished.  
Thor stood up in the windy dim.  
“We have to go, now.”  
“I can’t imagine…” Loki said, following him with his sight “…there is another place beyond this one.”  
“Oh, there are many,” Thor smiled, and reached his hand out to him. “Come.”  
Loki took his hand, toughened and rejoicing in feeling Thor’s protective strength flowing through that clasp and flooding him in such a new, such a fulfilling way. That strength, unknown just till a few moments before, was now so inconceivably reliable that he felt naturally right committing his whole self to it with no condition. And only then Thor, who squeezed that hand in his thawing in joy, only then since he found him in Hel felt the tangible awareness his little one – his little empty one, a piece of priceless clay to be remoulded - was back with him.

_“Sun.  
Powerful, bright, reassuring.  
The embrace a lost soul too long awaited. My soul. Your soul.”  
…  
“Rain.  
Cosy, discreet, cuddling.  
The whisper of a heart too long alone. My heart. Your heart.”  
…  
“Snow.  
Tender, intimate, alluring.  
The touch a bleary skin too long craved for. My skin. Your skin.”_

“Just stay next to me, Loki, and it will be alright.”  
Thor walked fast along the misty hallways, holding the hand of his brother like he didn’t intend to ever let it go anymore. Feeling his pale skin, feeling his flesh, his breath, his real consistence and dragging him along in that journey back to the light was some kind of emotion he could never be able to put into words.  
He didn’t noticed how the other creatures that crammed that Realm now didn’t dare not only to mock them, but not even to get close to them, doing nothing else but staring at them passing through; they probably all just burnt in envy, perceiving that Thor and Loki’s one was a trip to safeness that to them would have never been granted again.  
They walked a lot, no-one, nothing getting into their way; although, oddly enough they still didn’t come to see the gates of Hel. Thor realized they were running idle only when they happened to enter an immense room he was sure he didn’t cross on his outward. The roof, dropping big stalactites, was high and confused into a changeling fog that seemed to wheeze, while the unceasing wind moved the cobweb drapes covering the walls around; columns and arcades ran irregular all along the perimeter of the hall, hiding statues, shadows, living presences hanging precarious between that reality and elsewhere. Dominating the centre of that room, a huge, black throne whose backseat was a tangle of snakes, petrified and subsumed in the obsidian that constituted its main part; its arms were made of long, dark bones, and the iridescent penumbra weighing on the whole place and changing the tricks of light on it made that raised chair look almost alive.  
On that throne, sneering devilish in all her ghastly majesty, Hela, laying her creepy hands on the two skulls that completed her seat’s armrests.  
They froze in front of her, Thor holding Loki’s arm tight to keep him the closest he could to himself. He smelled the malice in the hellish air around way before she started to speak, _I knew it was too easy_ , he roared inside, _but don’t even think there might be something in the known worlds able to stop me._  
Right on his thought, across the frosty wideness echoed Hela’s grim voice.  
“Asgardians.”  
She stood on her feet, impressing, she moved a few, slow steps down the slimy stairs below her throne, all the shadows palpitating around wrapping her implausible body like appendages to her mantle of darkness. She stopped in front of them, looming high, and nailed her devious gaze right on their heads.  
“You are leaving our Realm in such a hurry.”  
Thor stared back at her, silently, and so did Loki supported by Thor’s strength, while she rang around them, clearly conniving some kind of murky ploy.  
“So impolite of you not even deign to thank us.” She chuckled, getting dangerously closer to Loki, her unfathomable eyes inspecting him. “But we managed to change your route a little, so that you could make amend.”  
An intrigued look showed up on her face, while she moved her hand to hold Loki’s chin, her sharp nails scratching his cheeks.  
She grinned.  
“Such a precious creature.”  
Thor tensed all up at that sight and snarled inside. _Stop. Touching him_. His fist – unseen – coiled Mjolnir’s handle. With a sneaky grimace she simply ran her fingers on Loki’s neck, slowly, making him gasp. She gloated on Thor’s stifled anger.  
“That requires an equally precious gift in return.” At once, she turned her eyes on Thor, looking blades at him. “Don’t you agree, thunderer?”  
 _“Try not to whet her wrath, if things allow you, when she will tempt your patience with her scams.”_  
The memory of Heimdall’s words was the only restraint to Thor’s seething. Last thing he needed was an upset Hela, for he just wanted to bring his Loki home and safe, so he yielded to the compromise to let her speak, though well knowing in advance he’d not tolerate further threats.  
“Name it, Queen of the Dead.”  
Her fingers now ran all along Thor’s armour, her eyes searching him like she was looking for a sign suggesting her something unique to request; her breath hissed on Thor’s face, her grin induced chills across Loki’s back, while the dark cloud of shadows surrounding them all became thicker and thicker. At some point, all of a sudden, her attention was caught by Thor’s hand persistently gripping the magic dagger’s hilt, and there she rose her sight directly into Thor’s eyes.   
“Oh. You seem very fond of that dagger.” She stretched her fingers out on it to skim it with her nails, sniggering, in crave. “Why?”  
Thor blinked on her, steadfast.  
“Forgive me, Hela, but that is not your concern.”  
She had a rush of peeve, she gritted her teeth, she grabbed Thor’s belt as if she was about to lift him from the ground and hurl him off.  
“Everything is our concern, as long as you walk in our domains, Thor Odinson.” Then, a more lascivious look replaced anger on her disturbing face, again she grinned, speaking right on Thor’s mouth. “Gift us with that dagger, and we will ease your way out.”  
Strengthening his grip on the weapon, Thor moved a fierce step closer to her, trying to find enough persuading words to make her desist.  
“Ask for anything else, and I’ll be honoured to provide it for you.” He took a deep breath to contain his burning rage. “But this dagger is not meant to be commodity.”  
She sizzled a snarl, plainly on the brink of a burst, and turned her hand back on Loki’s neck.  
“Then, perhaps we may decide he is no longer meant to be commodity as well.”  
Thor grabbed her rawboned wrist, still restraining his might, and blocked her clasp on his brother. His eyes blazed with the power of lightning.  
“Believe me, Hela.” Last chance. Last opportunity he could grant to mere words. “I’m not lying when I say this dagger would not be of any usefulness to you, nor any value.”  
“It is _to you_ ,” she retorted “and that makes it more valuable than anything else.”  
As she sprang up over them widening her arms to call the powers of darkness, Thor caught a flare pervading her throne behind; in the blink of an eye he realized the snakes and the other monstrous creatures joined to the rock and apparently rock themselves were instead coming alive. He glanced at Hela, now roaring enormous on their heads, he glanced at Loki, he snatched him away from her grasp just in time, “Run!”, he shouted pushing him backwards, he raised Mjolnir with a growl, perfectly aware of what he was about to unleash, and hell-bent on it. The thunder cracked on the throne, shattered it into pieces, while Hela’s scream made all the place rumbling, an instant before she – taken aback - was hit by a furious Mjolnir and banged against the farthest wall. Taking advance of her astonishment, Thor ran after Loki, who was petrified in amazement in front of Thor’s might, he grabbed his arm back, “I said run!”, and he hauled him away from Hela’s throne room across the trembling corridors.  
They ran and ran, fast as panthers of the highlands, careless of the howling darkness chasing them, careless of the roars of mad rage getting closer and closer, careless even of the direction they were following; they just ran, pushed on by some otherworldly fury that made them reach the Hellgate in what seemed to them just a few minutes. Thor stopped, a second to assess what could be done, a second to call the ultimate power of thunder, a second to fling Mjolnir against the bars whit all his vehemence and to break them in a burst of light to let them pass.  
Once out of the gates of Hel, on their frenzy panting, Thor didn’t waste a single instant to think: they flew on the iced bridge that disappeared under their feet step after step, they rushed into the Hellway and ran, riving the darkness like a blast of pure light until they were pulled out on the barren ground of Svartalfheim, gasping their lungs out.

_“You.  
The sun, the rain, the snow.  
You.  
The awakening of a body too long asleep. My body. Your body.  
You.  
Flawless reinvention, unaware in awareness.  
And beyond that, and beyond all.  
You.  
Me.  
Everything.”_

Thor helped Loki to get up, holding his arms delicately while he stared at him looking at that new place around, astonished, and then smiling like a happy child.  
“You alright, little one?”  
“I never did such a thing…” Loki went, still breathing heavily, his face oozing that light heartedness that was so typical of him since his childhood when dealing with the most risky situations. “It was… exciting!”   
A trait of his nature Thor had almost forgotten, after the last times of disgrace, a trait he loved so much. Yes, because if he was never happier as when he could erase reality holding Loki in his arms, he also – and that since they were boys - was never happier as when he had fun with him. How heartened he felt, how hopeful. That was the proof that a small part of _his_ Loki was still there.  
He chuckled, unable to turn his sight away from that cute little face.  
“It was indeed!”  
“And you are so… powerful,” Loki added, entranced, trapped into Thor’s eyes still enchained into his own. “Like a god…”  
Thor smiled, almost touched at his little one’s words, and grabbed the reins of his horse not to get lost on his crave for Loki’s palpitating body, that body so wonderfully _living_ again, that body he had so close and at the same time now he couldn’t help but fearing so far.   
“I am,” he answered. “As you are also.” He just skimmed his cheek with a light stroke. “We’ll have all the time to talk of everything.” A lump grew in his throat while he was speaking. “Just let’s go home, now.”  
He jumped in the saddle, stretched his arm out for Loki to grab it and dragged him up behind himself.  
“Hold on to me,” he said, taking his arms and securing them around his own waist. “Tightly.”  
And he spurred his horse in a mad gallop.  
He smiled to the wind, and he smiled to the sun, for he felt Loki clinging to him with such a spontaneous ardour that he almost broke into tears.  
Not for a single instant the thought of what he could have touched off fighting Hela nicked his perfect glee.  
He smiled to the wind, and he smiled to the sun, for his little one was sticking to his back, his chin on his shoulder, his cheek against his ear, his breath brushing his cheekbone.  
His heart beating on his spine.  
His heart.  
The way back flowed smooth and fast, like it was their souls riding over the clouds. Thor let his mount fly with no restraint, savouring every single meter of that wild rush. Riding together again, again nestled as one on his horse. But what an elating ride was that, compared to the last one he had with his Loki.  
His little one.  
Safe.  
Alive.  
No matter how long it would have taken to recover the plenitude of his priceless essence, nor how hard it would have been.  
He smiled to the wind, and he smiled to the sun.  
For he was taking back _life_.


	4. Change of perspective

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, to make life as complete as it was before everything bad happened, all that is needed is just a slight change of perspective.

The astonishment on Loki’s face at the view of the golden pillars of Asgard, glimmering still far in the mist of the dawn that befriended their arrival, was pure delight to be seen.  
Thor halted his horse to let his little brother enjoy the sight, and to let himself enjoy in turn Loki’s reaction; he never stopped basking in perfect joy, since Loki never slackened his clasp around his body, not for a single instant after they left from Svartalfheim. Not even now that they were not riding anymore. It didn’t take much time to Loki to inherently elect that mighty, blond-haired god as his fated lifesaver. That god who came for him so unexpected, risked his own life to take him along into a boundless, unknown world; he came for him challenging the darkness, devoting himself to his protection; that god, beyond any doubt, immediately made him feel – just as he claimed - the most important part of a life he now couldn’t remember, but that he felt unquestionably _real_.  
“It’s… beyond words…” Loki whispered, unable to contain his wonder before the splendour spreading from that city, so blinding that it covered even the sun. Oh, that was the gods’ abode, yes, he could easily believe, for just staring at it smelled _divine_. “I’d never suspect that somewhere else could exist such a place… So beautiful… that it hurts.”  
Looking at Asgard through Loki’s sparkling eyes, for the first time in his life Thor actually _saw_ that beauty. Something he never wasted time to think about before. It was happening again, as it happened a million times in the past already. How many breathtaking things he would have kept on missing, without the inborn guide of Loki’s soul.  
The perfect symmetry driving the towers of the central palace from the shortest to the highest, and from the sides to the middle, with the main one pointing its gleaming top to the sky, was soothing to the eyes and warming to the heart; the shiny buildings spreading all around, the suspended bridges connecting them in a crewel of gold, and the visual impact of the Bifrost from there, twisting and turning with its changeling rainbow all across the city, over the waters that surrounded a large parte of it, and fading slowly into the mist beneath, would have left whomever breathless.  
“You’re right, little one.” He blinked at the effulgence of his homeworld, enhanced by the radiance of the rising sun. “It’s really… beautiful.”  
All over everything else, the Tree of Life towered with its huge, evergreen crown, while the intricate tangle of its roots meandered through the air and through the ground, in all directions, bringing life force from there to the Nine Realms. How impressive, how magnificent and sheltering Yggdrasil was, and how… _comforting_ to think that it was there, the caring hand of an immense, devoted mother, watching over Asgard.  
Asgard.  
Waiting for a new king.  
Waiting for _them_.  
“And is that… home?” Loki stuttered in amazement, his voice unconsciously brushing Thor’s ear.  
Thor smiled, wondering how much longer he could resist having him so close and not yield to the urge of kissing him consumed.  
“That’s the closest place to home I can think of,” he answered, deeply.  
Loki frowned, a bit distracted by the pleasant sensation of Thor’s stomach slightly moving under his arms while breathing.  
“This is a weird thing you’re saying.”  
Thor’s pupils twinkled bluer than the sky above, getting lost afar over the profile of the city.  
“Oh no, it is not.” He turned his head a bit to seep that blue in Loki’s dazzled green. “Because no actual place is home.” To blow those addling words right on his mouth. “And all the places are, as long as we are there together.” That mouth so dangerously, so disarmingly close. “Home is you and me.”  
He waited on the speechless look on Loki’s face and time froze on the proximity of their lips, letting their breaths confuse together.  
“I… I don’t understand,” Loki whispered, hanging helpless on the turmoil of unpredicted feelings that proximity, together with those words, again was generating.  
Thor smiled at him the sweetest smile.  
“I know.” He just leant a warm, cheering hand on Loki’s wrists, holding them tight against his chest. “But you will.”  
And he launched his horse towards the closest place to home he could think of.

The perfect meld of wonder and happiness thrilling Loki’s whole body grew even more overwhelming as they entered the city, in the pushy light of the early afternoon. Thor could smell his amazement while Loki walked by his side along the wide, luminous hallways, spreading unaware beauty and lust all around, his hand never leaving the grab on Thor’s forearm, his eyes moving ecstatic from everywhere to everywhere, unable to get sated. It was such a joy for Thor to simply watch him gloating that he almost forgot to worry about his little one’s lost memories; and by the way, that unusual, rarefied Loki, on whose face not even a little sign of the past angst was still preserved, induced into his heart and soul a wave of flawless serenity.  
Everything in Asgard was imbued with the scent of godhood, everything looked so immense, so lustrous that even the people – all gods as well, Loki guessed –, walking along the streets and colonnades in their shiny clothes and armours, seemed tiny and negligible compared to the magnificence of the place; the only one who stood out in all his gorgeousness - Loki couldn’t help but feeling that deeply into his own bones -, taller, stronger, and haughtier than anyone else with his powerful body, his long golden hair, his solemn pace was Thor. He strengthened his grasp on Thor’s arm with both his hands, huddling up closer to him while walking, he giggled under the perplexed gazes of those around them, who didn’t dare to talk or even to approach, like they were witnessing some kind of prodigious event; Thor didn’t seem to care about them and so did Loki then, following his caretaker.  
Thor stopped right in front of the portal of the main palace, raised his gaze over the building and then on Loki’s face, taking a deep breath of relish.  
“Here we are.” His eyes fell smooth brushing the ivory of his brother’s neck. “The core of Asgard.”  
The hugeness of that portal, entirely in sterling gold and artfully garnished with godly scenes, symbols and inscriptions, commanded respect just looking at it; captivated and incredulous, Loki raised his shy hand to skim it, peering at the engravings that ran all along the edge and sure he caught also Thor portrayed in a couple of them.  
The dull creak of its opening at Thor’s gesture made him startle, taking him by surprise, and what disclosed to his eyes beyond the threshold left him speechless again. Never in the life he was mindful of, never he saw something even remotely similar.  
Immense hallways, and loggias, and windowpanes ran perfectly harmonious inside a rain of light, while the rays of sunshine, leaking in through the interstices between the columns, became integral part of the architecture; stairs, doors, burning braziers, enormous statues portraying gods and other otherworldly creatures stood imposing at every passage from one hall to the next.  
“I feel… overwhelmed.” Loki’s words echoed in the vastness of the corridors, along with their resounding steps while walking. “I… I can’t believe I was… familiar with… with all this.”  
Thor stopped, he grabbed his shoulders and then, delicately, he held his face in his hands, plunging an intense, sunny gaze directly into his eyes.  
“Of course you were, Loki.” _And I so need your lips to brush mine again. Please, tell me you can still feel it. Please_. But he just grazed his cheekbones with his thumbs, composedly. “This is the place where you… where we spent the most of our life.”  
“How is it possible?” The look on Loki’s cute little face was now lightly demoralized. “How is that I cannot remember a single thing? This is not a place one forgets easily…”  
The stroke Thor leant on his hair tasted pure confidence.  
“Don’t worry, little one.” And his smile smelled indubitable. “You, and me, and this place of ours together will make things right again. I promise.”  
That was enough to cheer Loki’s soul up and to restore plain happiness on his face. He grabbed Thor’s hand with renewed, innocent zeal.  
“Then, please… show me… everything.”  
“Sure.” Thor could breathe his little brother’s joyfulness. “But first… you must be hungry.” He chuckled. “At least, I know I am. Let’s go eat something.”  
As Thor said that, not an instant before, Loki felt hunger actually gripping his stomach. And he did not hesitate a second to follow his blond god.

“So you brought me back from the dead.” Sitting by Thor’s side in front of a bunch of tempting courses, Loki looked pensive and not so interested in food. “I was… dead.” Under the table, his thigh was brushing Thor’s, candidly. Avoiding that contact even for a little while would have made him feel irreparably lost. “That’s why everybody here looks at us like they were seeing… ghosts.”  
Thor kept his own stuck to that leg, shivering unseen, while snapping at a juicy chunk of meat.  
“Don’t mind them, they’re nothing.” He leant his eyes on Loki’s wistful face. “And you’re not dead anymore.”  
 _You’re not dead anymore_ , he repeated inside himself, his whole soul smiling.  
“This is a privilege that we, as gods, are granted with.” He winked at him. “The chance to come back from the dead.”  
Loki stared at him, puzzled and charmed, too many questions to be answered, too many blanks to be filled, too many feelings to be managed.  
“It’s so weird… While I was there, I didn’t feel… dead.” He played absently with the mug he had in front. “How… how did I die?” And blinked on Thor’s silence. “…was I killed?”  
He saw Thor’s face darkening mildly. And he had to wait a while longer to hear his voice again.  
“Yes.”  
Thor swigged a gulp of ale. How burning was to him the memory of that day, even now that he had his Loki there again. There, and so curious about everything. So _rightfully_ curious about everything. Thor saw that question coming, through the subtle wavering that ruffled Loki’s lips an instant before he spoke.  
“And… who killed me?”  
His eyes stuck into Loki’s, Thor put his food down on the plate and took a deep sigh.  
“I did.”  
Not even the God of Words, if there was one, could have found a way to describe the look that showed up on Loki’s face.  
“…y-you?”  
Thor nodded, without turning his gaze away from his brother’s.  
“Me.” His mouth stretched slightly. He knew that issue was meant to be faced, sooner or later. Better to do it forthwith, then. “And if I try and think of a more devastating moment in my entire life, I can’t find one.”  
Completely stunned, Loki shook his head, and first reaction that he could let out, he giggled.  
“Oh, no.” He got closer to Thor, peering into his eyes, that he saw paradoxically sincere. “No.” _You just came to save me, what are you talking about, now?_ “I will never believe such a thing. Never.”  
In a raptured, delicate gesture Thor’s fingertips reached the silk of Loki’s chest peeking out from his half opened vest and grazed it, softly, in relish.  
“You should, instead. Because I am the one who did it.”  
That skin. That precious skin. That skin he couldn’t help but melting on. That smooth. Pure. Intact. Skin.  
“…I stabbed you…” His voice trembled. “…right here… and killed you.”  
Still unable to take his words for true, Loki was caught unprepared at the sensation that sprung from Thor’s airy touch, and quivered with surprise. So unexpected. And so… intimate, so… intriguing. More disoriented, when he felt his own heart, at that touch, unwittingly hastening its beating.  
Then, the tiny tear he noticed dropping almost invisible from the corner of Thor’s eye overpowered the wave of all those feelings. And wiped any doubt out, making him freeze in bewilderment.  
“You mean… that is really… the truth…?”  
How was it possible? Everything he felt since Thor appeared to him in Hel could not be but true, he simply knew it; as he knew those blue eyes now speaking in silence were telling the truth as well. For a long while, in his mind, fog. The one who came for him, the one he trusted implicitly from the first instant, the only one his severed memories allowed him to consider _close_ … was the same one who killed him?  
“Yes, little one, that is the truth.” Thor had an heart pang in front of Loki’s malaise. “But behind that truth there is much more.”  
He clung on to Loki’s eyes, that were silently asking all the conceivable questions, he just let his own heart speak and told him the whole story. The spell, the beast, the chaos over the Realms, the magic dagger, the final trick that Loki himself arranged to force him to fulfil what could not be avoided in order to save everything. He saw his brother’s face changing its look while he was listening, he saw him fretting, then awestruck, then confused, and then… he prayed that beyond his heartfelt words the tears still there in his eyes could tell Loki more than any possible revelation.  
“Believe me, Loki,” he whispered at the end. “Since ever, I had to face the hardest fights, I saw people I cared about being killed, I myself was close to be killed several times. But believe me. Nothing ever broke me and… made me wish to be dead… like what I did to you.”  
Silence.  
A creek of crucial things about himself had swamped Loki in a few minutes. His death. God. Master of magic. Warrior. Incantations, battles, slaughters, creepy giants. An evil creature born from his dark side. His death, his death, his death.  
 _“You are more precious than anything else in my life.”_  
His death to save their world. His death to save their…  
His death by Thor’s hand.  
 _“Believe me”_ , he said. _“Believe me”_.  
Too many things to deal with all at once, too fast, too fast, too many. His eyes, his tears. _Crying_ , he could think only, _you’re crying. You’re so strong. And nonetheless… you’re crying_. And what he felt overtaking all those things, whilst they were the most shocking he heard since Thor went to Hel for him, was the disarming frankness oozing right from the soul of who was speaking.  
 _“Believe me”_ , his voice translucent as his eyes. _“Believe me”_.  
His eyes. It could not be anyway else. Tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, and the day after, and after. Breathe. Time. All the time. All the time laid ahead for all those things to be managed.  
All but one.  
 _“… more precious than anything else in my life.”_  
Bashfully, he raised his hand to touch the tears dampening Thor’s cheeks, addled, and fluttered, and...  
“I believe you.”  
…instinctively touched.  
Touched… that was a new feeling too. As it was new feeling appeased when he saw Thor smiling again. Thor, the one who killed him and brought him back to life. Who cried his heart so softly, while revealing him the most harrowing deed in his whole life. Who grabbed that hand and kept it on his cheek, closing his eyes, relieved as though he himself had just come back from death.  
Time seemed to stop on that waterfall of feelings, and neither of them noticed, at first, someone else taking a seat in front of them at their same table. When Thor finally turned his sight towards him, Loki did the same, frowning, and blinking. The man looking at them so closely had unique eyes, eyes he never saw before. Fearsome, in their impassive depth. He leant himself closer against Thor’s flank, he blinked again, feeling a vague weariness spreading across his limbs, loosely reassured anyhow when he realized that Thor clearly knew the newcomer.  
“Heimdall,” Thor said, as if he was sort of expecting to come face to face with the Gate-Keeper.  
The cryptic gaze Heimdall fixed on Loki made him feel naked. That man was watching right through his own soul, and he was floored by that. So he stayed silent, also because his mind was growing blearier and his eyelids more and more burdensome, as though the strain he endured in the last days was now leaving its mark all in one go.  
“This may be more difficult than I thought,” Heimdall stated after a while. “Now that I can see what the consequences are.”  
Suddenly concerned, Thor put his arm around Loki’s waist, holding him tight, he looked at Heimdall’s face then back at his brother’s, frowning in anxiety, for he saw on it the veil of incoming numbness. That he remembered so well.  
“Something wrong, little one?”  
Loki just shook his head, wearily, he took a deep breath and cracked a pale smile.  
“I don’t know… I think I’m just feeling… tired…”  
His hand under his chin, Thor kept his face up, “Hey, Loki, come on…”, watching his slumbering eyes getting more blurry. He glanced at Heimdall. “How is it? All of a sudden?”  
But on his words, slowly, Loki bent his head and leant it on his shoulder, unable to maintain his eyes open. Thor chilled, for it fatally occurred to him at once the magic sleep the Jotuns tormented his little one with. He tried to shake him gently, “Loki, what’s up?”, stroking his hair and cheek, unable to keep him awake, “Loki?”. Like an exhausted child who had played a whole day and who had been excited by way too many emotions, Loki just mumbled by reflex and made his head more comfortable between Thor’s neck and shoulder, already caught into the deepest sleep.  
“You do not have to worry,” Heimdall pre-empted Thor’s rush of anguish, “not this time. He is actually just… sleeping. Once the magic supply of Iduna’s apple is consumed, his body has to suffer the blow from coming back from death. That is not an easy thing to bear, but his physique will readjust.” His eyes inspected Loki’s relaxed face. “Just let him sleep until he feels the need.”  
Assuaged, Thor smiled with fondness and sweetly rubbed his cheek on Loki’s hair. _Then sleep, little one, and never fear_ , he murmured with his thoughts. _I will be here watching over you_.  
He moved his eyes up in front of himself only when he realized the silent, heavy gaze Heimdall kept on them both was waiting for a proper reaction.  
“Heimdall… what did you mean… it may be more difficult?”  
“The death from Odin’s dagger left him completely emptied. I was aware of the power connected with that dagger, but it went deeper than I could see.” He stretched an open hand out towards Loki as if he wanted to confirm his perceptions. “Now I can see through him as through a wall of glass. Nothing of his original soul, nothing of his past life is still there, except for the instinctive awareness you are a crucial part of it.”  
He paused, to calibrate his next words in order to aim directly to the core of Thor’s sense of commitment.  
“Asgard is waiting for both of you to redefine its fate. Odin’s condition needs to be managed, for it might turn out to be… dangerous.” He paused again, deepening his look into Thor’s eyes. “And moreover, you drove _her_ mad.”  
Boldness grew in Thor’s eyes.  
“…Hela?”  
Heimdall just nodded.  
“Do not think you can avoid her retaliation, Thor. It will take her a while, for it will not be effortless for her to act out of her Realm. But it will happen. And when it happens, you will need your little brother’s help. The help of his _whole_ self.”  
Thor strengthened his grip around Loki’s sleeping body. How peaceful he looked. His unaware Loki.  
“You mean he has to retrieve also his powers… as a master of magic, don’t you?” On Heimdall’s assent, he moved his hand on his own flank to touch the dagger’s hilt. “His soul is in this dagger. That, I’m aware of. But how will this dagger help him? How can I…”  
“The echo of his soul,” Heimdall pointed out, interrupting him. “That’s why he will need the spellbound chest enshrined in his secret place to recover his inmost entirety. But as you know already, he is the only one who can make that place approachable. You also know that place needs to recognize him to be entered. And as far as he stays emptied, this will never be achievable.”  
They both looked at Loki, Thor vaguely pensive.  
“He needs to recoup at least a tiny part of his pristine self,” Heimdall went on. “A sparkle, a drop in the abyss of his lost memories. It will suffice. Then, his secret place will do the rest.”  
“I am sure I will be able to help him doing that.”  
Something - to say the least - uncommon, the hint of a smile appeared on the Gate-Keeper’s mouth.  
“I am sure as well. I guess you are the one who can count on… the best arguments.”  
Thor chuckled, and glanced at his little one sleeping on his shoulder. After nodding to Heimdall, he picked Loki up in his arms, careless of the other people around looking at him, and headed to their room.  
Once locked inside, he laid his brother down on their bed, he just took off his boots and sprawled by his side, perfectly knowing he wouldn’t be able to get sleep. Heimdall’s words echoed in his mind but, in fact, Hela, and Odin, and Asgard’s fate seemed petty things to him compared to the fact he had Loki there. In fact, even the consciousness that Loki’s whole self must be restored for the greater good sounded negligible. Only one thing mattered. He had him there. More or less emptied, that was his Loki anyway, nothing could have changed that. And all that he needed, all that they needed in the worst case scenario was just a change of perspective.  
 _Here, in our room, in our bed, together_. He smiled to the ceiling. _Together_.  
And when Loki huddled up to him while sleeping, unconsciously, he guessed, to search for a chaste, saving hug as if that was the most innate among his habits, Thor let his own soul widen in gracefulness over a sea of bliss.

***

Loki slept for three days, he opened his eyes again on the fourth, in full daylight, and it took him a while to bring his own thoughts into focus. Under his body a large, downy bed, below his head a pillow effusing a mellow scent. Warm. Cosy. Comfortable. Something he never tried before. So pleasant, so relaxing it could induce to wish and lay on it forever.  
And sunlight. Sunlight everywhere.  
As he could rise his sight around, first thing he saw was him.  
Standing in front of the open windowpane, his back toward him and wearing nothing but a soft pair of pants, the sun flooded him emphasizing his silhouette. He was looking outside, musing, his sturdy arm half raised and leant against the jamb. His blond hair, gushes of that same sun falling soft on his shoulders, grazed the skin on his back like a voile of gold; that glorious body, whose brawn the light from outside defined in all their excellence, had been undoubtedly moulded from godly substance, and unleashed all its deity in such a natural way no-one could but think he was born from the perfection of heavens directly.  
“If I envision how must a god look like…” Loki whispered, sitting up on the mattress “…it looks exactly like you.”  
Thor turned himself at once, a big smile on his face.  
“You’re awake,” he uttered, and in the blink of an eye he was nuzzled on the bed, next to him, leaning a discreet hand on his thigh.  
Loki was still wearing the soft green vest he dressed him with for his funeral; it was so thin it let half-view his tiny nipples, caressing them, those cute, lovely nipples so delightfully impudent that Thor had to take a deep breath to contain his burning lust. The veil of that same vest adumbrated the lines of Loki’s body, and the unawareness now permeating it made that body even more tempting to Thor’s eyes that lingered on every smallest detail, while his heart melted in relish just for the mere fact of having him so close again, so _alive_.  
“How are you feeling?” he asked when he could rise his sight again on Loki’s charming face, his hand still brushing softly his brother’s leg.  
Entranced by the unknown light he saw in Thor’s eyes, captured by the bursting majesty of his body, Loki waved uncertain on all the unspoken he felt filling the physic space between the two of them, but that he could not yet identify. Even if the deep sleep gave him a bit of inner calmness, everything was still so confusing, if he just thought about it.  
“I am fine,” he smiled candidly at last “now that… now that I know I wasn’t dreaming about all this.”  
Dreams…  
 _“A sparkle, a drop in the abyss of his lost memories.”_  
Dreams could be a link to one’s lost memories, Thor was aware of that. And they definitely had been for his Loki, when the Jotuns casted their magic sleep on him.  
“Did you have… dreams, while you were there in Hel?” He sweetened his voice. “Maybe… you remember having seen Asgard, or Jotunheim, or… me… in your dreams?”  
Loki shook his head lightly.  
“I know I dreamt, sometimes… But I can’t tell you what I dreamt about. I was like… elsewhere.”  
His eyes stuck into Loki’s, Thor brushed his cheek with a mild stroke.  
“Tell me about this… elsewhere.”  
“I can’t remember it. All I can see are frames… like seaweed woods, and eerie scents, and haze.”  
That was another sign his real, full Loki was still there somehow. Those words, that voice saying those words, that velvety, inborn sensuality wrapping that voice…  
“Tell me about your feelings when you were there.”  
“I… I couldn’t feel warmth nor cold, I felt like… dawn did not rise and sunset did not fall, I’m sure no living beings that you can see walked there, just… shadows.” A soft grimace of disappointment. “I can’t remember.”  
Thor smiled on the saddened look on Loki’s face.  
“It’s alright. Never mind, little one. You just need time.”  
Loki smiled in return, wondering how that god’s smile alone could make him feel instantly reassured. It was just then that he realized how close he was to Thor’s half naked body, so close he could breathe the rare scent spreading from that skin, so close he could feel its warmth caressing him… How oddly he was shaken by that closeness, nevertheless feeling the need to stay right there and not an inch more distant.  
“How long did I sleep?” he asked, and when he heard that it had been three days he opened his green eyes wide on Thor’s face. “And… you were here… all the time?”  
“Even if it had been a century,” answered Thor, so earnestly that Loki could feel that was his heart speaking.  
Oh, feelings. On feelings, on feelings. All whirling in all directions, but all constantly flowing into a single point. Thor. He rested an instant, wondering on that. Thor. Then, for the first time since he woke up, he widened his gaze on that new place he found himself in. So fascinating, so full of things calling for his attention.  
“Where… are we?” he asked again, his eyes looking around in wonder.  
“This is… our room.”  
Thor’s gaze followed him putting his legs off the bed, his bare feet on the floor, and starting to explore the place around, eyes brimming with curiosity.  
“You mean… we live here?”  
“Most of the time, yes.” _And that means millennia_ , he added in his mind. _A sparkle in millennia must have survived_. “This place among all the places is the most… ours.”  
A few meters away from the side of the bed, Mjolnir was resting, leant against the wall. Loki’s eyes fell on it, and his hand, hesitant, skimmed its handle.  
“Is this… hammer… the source of your great power?”  
Thor giggled, getting closer to him.  
“Oh no, little one. My power comes from inside me. Mjolnir is just a vessel.” He looked tenderly at his brother trying uncertain to lift the hammer and not succeeding. Oh, how lovable was the endless bewilderment that showed up on his face. “Don’t be in wonder. No-one but me can lift Mjolnir.” He winked at him. “But you have vessels of power too.”  
“Do I?”  
“Sure. Wait.”  
When Thor brought him his magic spear and laid it on his hands, Loki looked at it with surprise. Thor didn’t need to ask him anything, for he clearly understood – not without a veil of frustration - he didn’t recognize it. Anyway, Loki didn’t seem to be too worried, for his attention had already been caught by something else.  
The walls at the bottom of the room were entirely covered by shelves, and those shelves, from the floor to the ceiling, were crammed with books. Hundreds of books, some looking very ancient and some brand new, some with their covers enriched by polished friezes, some very small and some incredibly thick, some of them colourful, some dusty. He didn’t remember he ever saw so many books, there weren’t books in Hel. Hundreds of books squinting at him with invisible eyes. He ran his fingertips over the spines, his mouth half opened in amazement, his eyes browsing the titles randomly, almost as if he was tempted to pick some from those tomes but he could not decide which ones.  
“Your books,” Thor whispered from behind him, almost talking on his hair.  
Loki turned on him a dazed look.  
“These are… all mine?”  
Nodding in silence, Thor found himself pondering on the fact that books were still able to seduce his little one more than a magic spear. He smiled, gladdened, for that made him so… Loki.  
But a new surprise was waiting for Loki, as he - captured by the dazzling light coming from outside – walked a few steps out of the windowpane. If the part of Asgard he already saw since they arrived had left him speechless, the view from that terrace, suspended over the rumbling waters of Asgard and letting the eyes get lost beyond the glaring lines of the cityscape, was the most astounding thing he could imagine.  
They spent a lot of time leant side to side against the bulwark talking about the wonders of Asgard, that Thor tried to describe him with the most captivating words that he could find, they talked of books and godhood, they had a little lunch in a more secluded corner of the terrace where – away from prying eyes – the tepid shade wrapping a couple of fluffy seats made the whole place more intimate.  
“All I could remember was a dark, cold place,” said Loki at some point, standing in front of Thor in that homey corner. “A place of grief and solitude. The only place I knew.” His mouth was smiling, his eyes were smiling, his whole body was smiling. “Then, you came for me. And in these few days I saw the most incredible things I ever could think of.” He was breathing Thor in his wholeness, a few centimetres from him. “I… I have no words, except...” Again, that closeness. Those feelings. “…thank you.” He whispered those words right on Thor’s mouth, his voice trembling. “For taking me here with you.”  
The warm breeze moved Loki’s hair while Thor took his head in his hands, his thumbs grazing his cheeks.  
“ _Here, with me_ is just where you belong.” The tips of their noses were almost touching. “And… there is something else… I want to show you.”  
Breathing Loki’s inner turmoil together with the irresistible scent of his skin, under the hugest, most ingenuous eyes he could conceive, Thor tilted his head a bit and apposed his lips to Loki’s, carefully, at first just brushing them with a tiny, soft kiss, and then another, and another, and another. Oh, the fragrance of that mouth, the taste he had been so afraid he’d never savoured again. His heart exploded and his eyes almost got filled with tears when he felt him stay, hesitant, slightly embarrassed, surprised, unprepared, curious. _What is this?_ , thought Loki, at the complete mercy of the new jumble of feelings that Thor’s mouth was making him shiver with, _what does this mean? What…_ and nonetheless, he couldn’t help but pandering. So, more sweetly than he’d ever thought he could do, Thor ventured deeper, his tongue weaved in between Loki’s teeth and slowly induced him to open his mouth, slipping inside, gentle, attentive in thoughtfully caressing the precious casket revealing him its so yearned wonders again. _It’s like… your first kiss_ , he realized all of a sudden, he searched him more intensely at the same time careful not to become less sweet. His blood soothed with tenderness when he felt Loki gradually learning how to follow his tongue, getting more and more confident, and indulging, and… _oh, little one, your first kiss…_ That awareness alone shook his soul like a storm. Their bodies weren’t touching yet, only their mouths and tongues, that stayed entwined together as if they had a mind to consume all the time that was left just in that kiss.  
Ages, before Thor could re-emerge, and even then he could not let those lips go at once; he lingered blowing on them another bunch of busses, more and more touched because now Loki was so naturally answering to him, soft, innocent, trapped, as though once discovered such an intriguing thing he didn’t want to stop anymore.  
When Thor was able to open his eyes again in Loki’s, he kept his forehead against his little one’s, his hand on his cheek, his mouth the closest he could to his little brother’s.  
“Did you…” His voice was just a whisper on Loki’s mild panting. “…remember… this?”  
Loki smiled on his whisper.  
“No…” He tried to gulp down his own heart beating right in his throat. “…but it was… it was...” And he just smiled again, unable to let any other word out.  
There they stayed, suspended on the echo of that kiss, Loki just trembling softly, still addled in front of those gleaming blue eyes that were caressing him like devoted hands.  
 _“You are more precious than anything else in my life.”_  
He was starting to understand, now. He was starting to see the whole that undoubtedly linked the two of them, even if he had no memory of it, and he felt it screaming its rightness so strongly that he could not wait any longer.  
“Tell me… everything… about us…” Thor’s chest was palpitating an inch from his own while he stammered those words right on his mouth. “…everything.”  
Thor kissed those lips again.  
“I can’t tell you that with just…” And again. “…mere words...”  
He was inebriated by that innocence, by that crave for discovering more melted with wavering, he leant his hands on his neck, he slipped his fingers under his vest to graze his shoulders, he felt him shivering with surprise.  
“If you ask me…” he muttered “…why _you_ …”  
Oh, that pure Loki. That treasured trove now so astonished under his touch.  
“…it’s because my life could not even carry that name, if you weren’t part of it.” He ran his fingers through his hair, he made him rise his head, looking at him like he was seeing a prodigy. “It’s because I love this hair, and I love this face.” How sweet that voice sounded, though being so deep and husky. “I love these cheeks, this nose, these lips.” Loki blinked in awed silence under the little kisses that skimmed his cheeks, his nose, his lips. “It’s because I could drawn into these eyes.” Thor’s smile on his mouth, Thor’s eyes in his eyes. And he held his breath, shot through by an unknown thrill, when Thor slowly opened his vest and slipped it off to free his skin. “It’s because I love this neck…” Thor’s lips behind his ear, soft. Thor’s words. Quivers. “…these shoulders…” Those raspy hands, so strong, and nonetheless so delicate. “…this chest.” Loki’s breath hastened, his eyes blinked in confusion, for his body was reacting to that touch in a never expected way. “And I adore these nipples.” To those fingertips now brushing his nipples like they were caressing the rarest gems in the worlds. “It’ because...” That touch, those hands, those fingers Loki _liked_ , Loki _wanted_ to feel on his body, even without knowing why. “…I love this skin.” On his waist. Smooth. On his belly. Making him startle when he felt a sweet, delightful tension rising right between his own legs, discreet at first, but growing stronger. “And I could die on this tummy.” Confused, surprised, astounded when Thor’s hand slid inside his pants to reach him right there and graze him. He gulped. His eyes opened wide, as did his mouth, on the sudden storm unleashing inside him. An instant, Thor’s graceful fingers moved and Loki’s pants were unlaced, falling down, inducing him to step out from them and to get closer to the one who was turning all his insides upside down just with his touch. Thor was still smiling, eyes locked in his eyes, his palm still holding him there, carefully, there where he was so tensing up. “It’s because… I could kill for this… jewel.” His other hand glided like a newborn leaf on Loki’s back, to rest on the perfect curve of his glutes. “…as I could kill for these buttocks.” Holding his hand, Thor sat on the seat behind them and drove him down gently on his knees. “But most of all…” He grabbed his nape softly, to make him bend his head a bit and kiss his forehead. “…It’s because I love this mind.” He looked at him, he smiled, serene, he kissed him in the middle of his chest. “And I love this heart.” He kept him there, his fingers skimming his skin between his groin and thigh, entranced at the idea – so weird, so unimaginable, so… intriguing - that Loki was about to discover sex for the first time. “I love the everything that you are to me.” Touched, eager, aroused. “You are the food to my body… and to my soul.” He’d always wished to be Loki’s first one as Loki – as a male lover - had been for him, and now… now he could. His lips brushed Loki’s, his eyes pleading, while he blew those words right through his breath. “And I’m starving.”  
He plunged into his mouth, ardently, craving for his tongue, his hand started moving sweetly on that trembling, ingenuous sex, the other one rubbing the silk of his back, up and down, delicately, along with the shivers that more and more intense shook Loki’s body. Loki, who couldn’t manage the unthinkable response Thor was provoking in him, and that he felt growing so daintily hurting, breaking his breath, dimming his brain, forcing him to grab Thor’s shoulders and to come off from that kiss, panting.  
“W-what… are you… what is… that…”  
A caring smile on his mouth, Thor suddenly slowed his hand, his free arm around his brother’s waist, still holding him tight. His eyes wrapped Loki’s in a blanket of invulnerable confidence.  
“Do you…” He veiled his throat with a thousand little kisses, unable to get sated of the scent of his skin. “…want me…” His lips reached Loki’s nipple, his tongue wetted it turgid, making him almost jump. “…to stop?”  
Loki gasped in a whirl, again he blinked, clung to Thor’s shoulders as if he were hanging in the balance on the highest cliff and about to fall down.  
“Oh, n-no… no… it’s… oh…”  
Thor searched for his lips again, calm, while he restarted rubbing him more intensely, delighted in feeling him getting helplessly harder in his hand.  
“Then don’t worry, little one…” He smiled, tenderly. “That is just… meant to happen.” He glanced at him and then down at his own sex, stiff and vibrating against his tummy in all its magnificence. He sighed in relish. “…see?”  
The bright green of Loki’s eyes fell on Thor’s hard-on, those eyes huge of surprise; he’d wished to move his hand to reach and graze Thor there as well, charmed, puzzled, intrigued, but Thor’s grab on him, getting more and more persistent, did not leave him any time to move wittingly, nor to breathe, not even to give form to a single thought. Thor felt his helpless clasp on his shoulders, and he panted his heart on his chest while Loki arched his spine and rolled his head back, he brushed his neck with his tongue, so gratified in feeling him completely lost to his hand. And when Loki could not hold back an instinctive, desperate yelp of pleasure, Thor strengthened his grip around his thrilling body and almost climaxed.  
He nipped Loki’s lobe mildly, gasping on his ear, “…oh, Loki…”, he could just moan, he grabbed his own manhood in his hand together with his brother’s and rubbed them as one, holding Loki tighter and tighter, to reassure him with his guidance in that chaos of feelings, with his devotion, with his trusty presence.  
Loki swallowed the air, falling prey to the shivers that perturbed his body, at the mercy of that hand he was sure that could kill him with its growing hits of elation. Oh, that hand. That single hand giving him a mind-blowing, that hand taking him higher and higher on the quaking cliff of emotions, that hand that was not stopping, that he didn’t want to stop. He panted, he gasped, he moaned, he cried out, _catch me_ , his whole body shouted an instant before he plummeted from that invisible precipice, _hold me_ , he instinctively threw his arms around Thor’s neck and shoulders latching on him in a sudden, convulsive grip, hiding his face in Thor’s hair, that filled his mouth together with the inebriating flavour of his skin, again he moaned, and again, and again. And at last, when he was sure all that turmoil would have crushed him into pieces, at last, unable to tame even the smallest part of his palpitating body, from there where all the tension had grown delightfully intolerable he felt his own soul spurting itself out, wildly, in a warm, prolonged gush that left him breathless and drove his mind all blank.  
Overwhelmed by that clasp, by that rampant climax raining on his hand and stomach, by the cloud of tenderness wrapping the awareness that was _the first time_ in his little one’s new life, Thor groaned his gleefulness to heavens and spilled his joy on him, gingerly, blessing every nuance of the grace the fates were gifting him with. Without loosening his grasp around his brother’s waist, his hand kept rubbing them both softer and softer on to the last drop, his eyes filling with tears, his lips kissing him frantically wherever they could reach him, to drive him gently down to the calmness of reality.  
How much time flew on their clutched bodies throbbing more and more quietly, they never knew; they just knew that when they started feeling the breeze caressing them again, it was like the whole eternity had gone by.  
His nose still sunk in Thor’s hair, his arms still clasping him compulsively, Loki forced his voice out in a whisper, breathing his sweat together with the scent of ecstasy.  
“I am not sure… I understood… what happened…” How soft, Thor’s hands sweetly grazing his back. “…but I want it to happen again…” How warm, his feathered lips caressing the skin behind his ear. “…and again…” How soothing, the blow of his smile on his hair. “…and again…”  
The air of fulfilled peace blanketing them both after that squall of feelings tasted unutterable. Skin stuck to skin, chest to chest, groin to groin, neither of them seemed to be wishing to slacken that spasmodic, enlivening embrace.  
“What happened…” Thor muttered on the velvet of his cheek “…makes me yours and makes you mine…” He just couldn’t help but putting a little kiss on every word he whispered. “…in a way no-one else but us will ever be able to conceive.”  
The crystal bubble trapping them vanished slightly as he grabbed his brother’s shoulders and made him lift his head, taking him back to the palpable link with his eyes, now pregnant with that newborn awareness. Thor didn’t ask him if that sparkle in his lost memories did turn on, he saw from the astonishment still glaring on his face that it didn’t; but he didn’t care, for on that same face he also saw flawless delight. That was enough. He shivered with fondness when Loki glanced down at their sexes now resting on one another in their melted semen, and frowned again, perplexed, in front of that soft white cream that moistened their groins and tummies. Cautiously, Loki dipped his fingers in it, he picked up some and just stared at it, curious.  
“This is… sort of… magic…” He turned a questioning look on Thor’s face. “It came from… inside… us…”  
Under Loki’s intrigued eyes, Thor took his hand to his mouth, slowly, and with alluring carefulness lapped the juice up from his index. That enticed Loki, wavering a bit, into doing the same.  
“It tastes… sweet…” he murmured, amazed at that new discovery.  
Thor grazed his cheek.  
“It tastes of us,” he said, so warmly that Loki couldn’t help but smiling at him and laying a soft kiss on his lips. Thor’s fingers ran along his arm to reach his hand again and hold it. “Let’s go back inside.”  
The warmth of their room welcomed them more intimate to Loki’s soul as he followed Thor in the wake of relish, that was keeping him so high and craving for more, that forced him not to turn his eyes away from that gorgeous body now walking so delightfully naked at his side, that body he now crazily needed to touch as his own had been touched just a while before. _My Thor_ , he thought, _my handsome, my… sweetest. Thor_. Slightly annoyed, for it really sounded impossible to him not being able to remember. But in fact, did that actually matter? Never in the life he was aware of he felt so good, so satisfied, so flawlessly in the right place, at the right time, with the right one. So, really… did anything else matter?  
“Our pool,” Thor said on his thoughts, and Loki realized there was another room inside their room, scented, a subtle, almost invisible mist floating around, and a big marble tub right at the centre. Thor jumped in the water, plashing him, and stretched his arms out to him still standing on the border. “Come?”  
Loki laughed, he bent, he stretched his arms towards him in turn, Thor’s hands under his armpits, he jumped in as well, sliding on Thor’s body, holding his breath when after the jump they found themselves breathing in each other’s mouth. The water was so cosy. That whole place was so cosy. Thor’s body was so cosy. And all wet, so wondrous. He smiled with enchantment, his hands almost respectfully grazed those blond hair, those cheeks veiled by that soft stubble, they slid on those mighty shoulders and on those majestic pectorals that vibrated under their touch, they rested there, savouring the unveiling miracle of those nipples stiffening at the stroke of his fascinated fingers, while he felt that enthralling urge – now consciously craved – shaking his bowels again.  
“You are… so… handsome…”  
On Thor’s entranced look he kissed him deeply, venturing his hand an inch under the surface of the water to grab his manhood, he gasped as he felt it getting hard at once, filling his fist. _You. The sun, the rain, the snow_. Amazed. Excited. _You. The awakening of a body too long asleep. My body. Your body_. Aroused. The endless, unexplored lands of flesh were opening wide right in his hands.  
“This… what we are doing…” he muttered, trying to find the right words.  
“Sex,” Thor pre-empted him, soflty.  
A slight, spontaneous rush of lust in Loki’s voice then made Thor shiver.  
“…sex?”  
Thor nodded sweetly. He swallowed his own heart, blinking on his little brother’s grip, _Oh, little one, you’re learning fast_ , he clasped his nates to keep him stuck to his belly, locked into his eyes. _And there is so much more I want to make you feel._  
Loki breathed in his mouth, their groins rubbing together.  
“I didn’t remember… sex…” His smile. So innocent, and so naturally seductive at the same time. “Was I… good at it?”  
Moving his hips along with Loki’s hand getting more and more confident on his manhood, Thor stared at his face, that the light of the sunset seeping through and reflecting on the water coloured with all the shades of desire.  
“Don’t say… ‘I was’…” His fingers brushed the groove between Loki’s glutes, again and again, just that, just to feel him quiver in his hands each time he did it. “You _are_ the best.” Gently, then, he held his wrists, interrupting him, he took his hands to his mouth and leant a kiss on each palm, sipping the spots of water away. “And I… was missing you so much.”  
Bending slowly in the water, he drew a line of kisses from his throat down, along his chest, along his tummy, revealing him the secret tricks his skilful tongue could drive him mad with. He lingered on his groin, an inch over the water, tickling those little corners of his body that he knew so well being most sensitive, and that to Loki instead unveiled as so surprising just then. _You. Flawless reinvention, unaware in awareness_. Oh, the universe of mutual touch making itself manifest in the most unexpected ways, now gifting its wonders through Thor’s lips lapping the silk of his thighs there where they stopped being legs and became inguen, while his fingers, softer than wadding, outlined the furrow of his spine, and the profile of his flanks, and the panting alabaster of his belly.  
Thor’s tongue played the sweetest plays on his sex, in such a long, delicate mix of smooches, and licks, and strokes that he lost any control anew, _I will take you with me, little one, again and again_ , going astray in a throbbing cloud of pleasure; and when Thor finally wrapped him in his mouth, _higher than the highest mountain_ , that warm, mushy, steamy mouth sheeting him like a velvet glove, Loki let a desperate moan out, _further than the farthest star_ , for he was not prepared to that new miracle. He held his breath, he clutched Thor’s head and hair, he arched over him, and almost at once, before he could realize and manage that dazzling trip to make it last as long as possible, he impulsively poured all himself in his throat, wondrously disoriented again at that uncontrollable reaction of his body.  
Overwhelmed by the ingenuous promptness of that response, that told him with no doubt how much that emptied Loki was still _his_ , Thor grasped his nates desperately, to keep him stuck in his mouth and keenly swallow even the smallest bead of his sweet juice, thirsty and desirous and revelling as though he was sipping life itself.  
After that glove of rapture slowly let go of him to allow an ecstatic look rising up to his face, Loki fell down in the water as well, in Thor’s arms, on Thor’s chest, in Thor’s mouth.  
“Oh, little one, I was so… afraid…” Thor whispered, unable to stop kissing his lips and almost crying. “…I couldn’t hold you in my arms again…”  
Loki shuddered at that word. _Afraid_. Seeing that mighty god, _his_ mighty god, whose power could erase entire worlds, lowering any defence, feeling him so unconditionally, genuinely _lost_ to him, induced tears to well up in his eyes too. There was a jumble of words eddying in his mind, words he remembered only as sounds, thousands empty words linked to feelings that he was no more able to recognise.  
Now one of them, _love_ , was retrieving its meaning.  
And rediscovering it from scratch was overpowering.  
 _Love._  
His arms around Thor’s shoulders, his eyes locked in his brother’s, his whole body still tensing in the uncontrollable urge that didn’t let him detach his skin from Thor’s, he smiled at him, still charmingly stunned at the echo of the feeling that overturned his body while being… _drunk from_.  
“Y-you… and me…” The words struggled so much to get out from his mouth. “…what is happening… between us…” So hard to give voice to all his whirling thoughts. “…is it the same… as before? Before I… died?” That seemed the only thing really able to trouble him. “Before I forgot everything? The… flawless things… you make me feel… I want to be still able… to make you feel the same…”  
That smile. That pure, disarming smile shining again on Thor’s face while he caressed his cheek.  
“How can you think you aren’t?”  
That smile having the power to make everything alright.  
“What happens between us…” Thor added, inherently as if it was the most natural thing ever that he was saying “…is never the same.” Again, a kiss. “It’s always new. And always flawless. Always been, always will.” _I know you know that, even if you don’t_. “We are… a drug… to each other.”  
Loki then kissed him back, a long, intense kiss that made both shiver with renewed desire. And when that kiss faded into a smile, he knew he had just seized another blatancy about his forgotten life.  
“That… is not hard to believe.”  
Thor giggled and nestled him, he drew him down underwater in a sudden rush of childish frenzy. They laughed, they played like footloose kids for minutes, with no other worry in their heart except their joyfulness.  
That play went on when they got out of the pool and Thor grabbed a large towel, wrapped Loki in and started rubbing him down blithely, while he told him they always used to do that after a bath when they were kids and Loki looked to him like a drenched chick. “You were so cute,” he giggled, ruffling his wet hair with a corner of the towel. He picked him up in his arms, still all sheathed in the towel, “Such a cute, drenched chick”, he threw him on their bed and jumped on him, keeping him enveloped in that tangle and faking a fight not to let him free himself. They both laughed till they cried, and only when Thor had him stuck and exhausted under his panting body he loosened his grip and began to unroll the towel, slower, and slower, and slower. Trapped again, again enchanted before that ravishing creature revealing the treasure of his skin, that priceless creature he feared lost and now instead he could smother with his love again.  
Little by little they sweetened their laughter silent, Thor grazing that skin in rapture, Loki holding his breath under that touch. No words were needed, for they fastened their gazes into one another’s, on the mutual awareness they were aroused again. _Just… one more time?_ , Loki’s eyes begged, sparkling with lust. _All the times that you want_ , answered Thor’s, while his hands, gently, drove him turned on his flank.  
Thor leant his chest against his back, he moved his hair aside to kiss him behind his ear, his other hand stroking his shoulder.  
“Just close your eyes,” he whispered on his neck, kissing him there again. “And let me…” And again. “…talk to your body.”  
Loki complied, and from that moment on he never knew what Thor’s tongue and fingers actually did to him; but oh, they talked. And they talked ecstasy.  
From his nape down, Thor lingered on each one of the kisses he leant on his shoulders, then all along his spine, then on his hip, then on the dainty dimples winking at him from there where Loki’s back curved into buttocks; feeling him throbbing at every little touch of his lips, Thor made his tongue’s way the slowest possible, lapsing into the so long sought enthrallment of that skin. Then, softly, he put an hand under his thigh and pushed his leg upwards, to bring his glassy nates about to widen. How pliant that reborn Loki was, how tender, indulging all himself to Thor’s moves, so implicitly confident. Touched, and fervent, Thor laid a long, endearing look on the palpitating blossom of his rim, his breath getting faster, and his erection harder. Oh, that precious little blossom now still inviolate, that blossom so delightfully framed by the milky peaches of his glutes, that he kissed and kissed and kissed with the most careful zeal. That blossom about to bloom right in his hands, and to disclose for him to gather up all its marvels in a way they had never been gathered up before. For a long while, ecstatic, he just grazed it with the tip of his thumb, moved as he felt Loki holding a little moan and tensing backwards, mildly at first, to search for the continuance of his touch; then he apposed his lips right where that fresh groove started, his tongue tarrying on and on along it, and on the trembling borders of that ring, savouring every smallest thrill, every sigh, before venturing in like in a temple. There, Loki just let himself get lost along with Thor’s tongue, stirring into him a feverish sea of wonders and leading him to relinquish any perception of reality. He gasped on the pillow, his eyes clamped, when Thor’s finger joined his tongue in that unthinkable rummage, playing together for an endless while and then fingers alone, one first, and then two, and three, titillating him inside more and more keenly in a way he’d never thought conceivable.  
“P-please…” he panted on the strokes of Thor’s lips sliding back up along his spine, “…y-you… oh… this…” on Thor’s free arm slipping under his flank and on his hand blocking his leg bent against his own chest, “…t-this will… oh…” on the shy little muscles of his rim he felt unconsciously clinging to those fingers, “…kill me… again…”  
Thor just searched him more deeply, more thoroughly, with no rush, blowing a feathery “…shush…” right on his nape, that he nibbled delicately on the ceaseless swirling of his fingers, so dependable, so sure, so skilful in making him more and more relaxed _there_ , more and more receptive, more and more ready.  
Only when he felt him totally pandering he slid his fingers out, he leant that hand on Loki’s glute and laid his craving sex on that shivering groove, at first just lingering in the lovely grip of those buttocks, and then rubbing him in-between, softly, delaying endlessly the instant when he drove his glans to the core of that blossom, poking it tactfully, adumbrating its presence. _Go on, I can’t wait any longer_ , Loki’s rim breathed, _take me wherever you like, and I will follow_ , more and more eager of the unknown that was about to come. Thor felt him tensing under his taps and instinctively moving himself backwards, in a spontaneous plea for a deeper approach; he strengthened his grasp under his leg and pushed himself inside, sweetly, all in one shove, melting on the long, suffocated moan that broke Loki’s breath at once, on the desperate clasp of his ring as he was in, on the spontaneous pressing of his nates against his groin in response to his ingoing. Holding him tight, panting on his hair, he just stayed still, to feel him latching all around his manhood tightly and blindly as never before. Unable to control his gasps Loki groped for his free hand, he tangled his fingers with Thor’s and squeezed them convulsively, again taken aback. Oh, being filled with him and with him become one, in such a devastating way, feeling him to the full, so huge, so powerful, so delightfully hurting… All that went way further than anything he had already felt until then, in that prodigious day of revelation. Shakes all across his limbs, shakes in his stomach, shakes even into his brain. Thor let him quiver wildly, nestling him tight and just moving his hips feebly to make himself more reliably in, waiting for his throbbing body to get more and more accustomed to _his majesty_ , until he heard him whining a long _ooh_ of fulfilment.  
Oh, inside him again. Inside him. Feeling that pale warmth, sweeter than the sweetest mead, more inebriating than the finest nectar. He pushed a little more, softly, he stopped, he rested, on the new, prolonged moan that Loki couldn’t hold; keeping his brother’s leg stuck in that position that allowed his manhood to pierce him in the innermost, still holding his hand Thor clasped him with his free arm, he cuddled him, he groaned on his cheek, he throbbed. Slowly, he then pulled himself almost entirely out and then he pushed again, a longer, measured, even deeper shove that broke the breath anew in Loki’s throat and made him almost cry. And then he stopped, he rested, grasping him tighter in his arms, his groin melted with his buttocks, his sex vibrating all inside him, caring, attentive. Never in taking him he had been so cautious, so sweet and thoughtful, never so self controlled in his burning desire; but now he had to, for Loki as well had never been so pure and so defenceless. Everything was so different, so unusual… and yet it was the same, supreme perfection.  
He pushed, Loki felt him screaming into his bowels and on that scream he cried out his heart and soul, _I’m yours, you’re mine_ , his moans and sighs and shivers shouted, _“…in a way no-one else but us will ever be able to conceive”_ , now Loki understood, tossed around in that hurricane of feelings, oh yes, now he understood. Having him in was the most stunning adventure, it was tasting the sky and smelling the stars, it was breathing the sea, it was hearing the snow falling and the fog clearing.  
It was Thor becoming him and him becoming Thor.  
It was the two of them becoming everything.  
Thor gasped on his face, he pushed again, nipping his neck, his lobe, his lips, he pushed, he stopped, he rested; he pushed again, more deeply, he pushed again, more fervently, and Loki moaned more desperately on each shove, entangled in Thor’s grip, both his hands now grasping Thor’s arms convulsively, dying a little every time Thor pushed and every time being revived again to a dimension of more devastating pleasure.  
“Oh, little one…” he heard Thor whispering in the wet fog clouding his mind. “…trust me… we’re n-never losing each other… again… never…”  
Along with the spasmodic shivers shaking his body and Thor’s he felt the unearthly love, “…never…”, he felt the peerless joy turning into tears and dropping from Thor’s eyes on his face, “…ever…”, he felt him moaning hoarsely his ultimate fulfilment and clutching him so tightly he thought they’d never been able to separate anymore from one another.  
When Thor sensed that Loki could not hold any longer, only then he let go of his leg, to free him in his coming, he grabbed his sex, he rubbed it impetuously to take his climax beyond any line and drive him frenzied. And in the same instant that Loki cried his lifeblood out sprouting convulsively on his arms, he gushed all his torridity inside him, again, and again, and again, sanctifying that last, concurrent climax within the nuances of the ineffable.  
Everything fell silent, on their exhausted panting getting lower and lower.  
 _And beyond that, and beyond all._  
Neither of them could force the eyes open for a long while.  
 _You._  
They just rested there, stuck together, on the returning wave of revelation.  
 _Me._  
Revelation.  
 _Everything._  
When time restarted to flow, the night was falling darker. Loki turned himself slowly, his eyes still closed, without letting any corner of his skin detach from Thor’s, and hid his face in the redolent alcove of his neck.  
“Thor…” he whispered, and Thor gloated inside, for since he found him in Hel that was the first time that Loki called his name. “I don’t need… to retrieve my memories.” He brushed his nose in his hair. “Now I know all that I need to know.”  
The words an instant after Loki breathed on his neck, right behind his lobe, penetrated Thor’s skin, melted with his blood and ran through his veins up to fill his heart.  
“Let’s make this bed become our home forever.” He snuggled up to that godly body that wrapped him in its embrace. He felt completely good. He felt _complete_. “Let me live here, with you, and nowhere else, for the rest of my days.”


	5. Whispers of light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One is the sun, the other is the night. One is the golden strength of the light, the other is the black tricks of the darkness. But what would be the sun without the night? And what would be the light without the darkness?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem – that is not exactly a poem – I quote in this chapter is “Aube” (“Dawn”), from “Illuminations”, by Jean-Arthur Rimbaud.  
> About the runes and the magic words you’ll come across reading this chapter, I made a little research about ancient Norse magic symbology – and I obviously added a bit of my own.

_“I embraced the summer dawn.”_

They forgot to sleep, they forgot to eat, they forgot the world around, they just lapsed into the warm, boundless field of their bed, on the time flowing slower and slower, on the constantly renewing prodigy that to Loki were their bodies weaving together.

_“Nothing stirred on the face of the palaces. The water was still. Crowds of shadows lingered on the road to the woods. I walked, dreaming the warm, brisk winds, and precious stones looked on, and wings soared in silence.”_

They couldn’t stop touching, mixing to that little giggles and jokes, they couldn’t stop kissing, alternating their smooches with their talking; they couldn’t help but letting, for countless times, their caresses win on their voices and, for countless times, they couldn’t help but lusting after more. Never tired, never sated, most of the time just necking without thinking and without weight, they simply had to follow the vortex of elation that seemed to have confined them into a secluded dimension, getting out from which sounded no longer conceivable.

_“The first venture, on the path already full of fresh and pale glitterings, was a flower who told me its name.”_

“There can’t be…” Loki panted in Thor’s mouth, smiling his perfect fulfilment on Thor’s hand that again was taking him to the heavens. “…anything… else…” And on his own hand learning in turn more and more skilfully how to take Thor along. “…worthy… to live for…” He moaned his glaring joyfulness together with his certainty on the new milky rain that sprinkled their trembling fingers. “…except… th-this…”  
And his head fell on Thor’s bosom, his cheek stroked his chest, absorbing sweat and bliss as though he was absorbing living force. Breathing their unceasing arousal, he smiled again, peaceful, because the whole void that his mind still actually was had just been replenished with the most extraordinary treasure he could ever think of.  
His hand cuddled Thor’s sex, that vessel of the miracles he was discovering since a few hours and that he felt like he already knew since ever; he cuddled it candidly, as candid was the smile that went along with his enraptured words.  
“It is so… beautiful… like… a work of art…”  
Thor melted down in relish, for the unspoiled sensuality in Loki’s voice was a caress to his heart; he lifted his brother’s head in his hands and dampened his lips with a soft kiss, blessing the fates for giving him the chance to taste that uncontaminated Loki. Free from any hatred, free from any anguish and any trouble, transparent, and in his transparency just flawlessly blissful to be there, with him. Delightfully dazed in the changeling maze of his love, Thor wrapped his little one’s eyes in an ecstatic gaze, following with no break and with no worries the wave of their desire.

_“I laughed at the blond wasserfall dishevelled through the pine trees: at its silvery summit I recognized the goddess.”_

And then again, new sorts of playing, new miracles revealed, new borders crossed, together with their reaching the highest tops of pleasure. It was a muddle of kisses and laughs and strokes, that mixed with Thor’s little revelations at any Loki’s question interposing here and there among their moans; it was the universe itself lowering its last barrier to let them get beyond; it was, to Loki, like savouring the essence of that godhood he still couldn’t believe he was born from.  
“When you come in my hand, and I can look at you while you are coming…” said Thor, locked in his brother’s eyes, those eyes so blurry with speechless rapture after the hundredth climax “…that’s the most warming thing ever… to my heart.”  
Loki slid on his body, his hands grabbing his shoulders, his mouth hanging on his lips.  
“You said… between us… it’s always new…” he purred, still shivering from the last apex, and nonetheless he widened his glutes to rub his begging rim sweetly on Thor’s shaft. “You… are so right…” His tongue searched for Thor’s tongue, again, again, again. “And I… I want to taste… all the newness… in all its forms…”

_“Then, one by one, I lifted her veils. In the pathway, waving my arms. In the open field, where I denounced her to the cock. In the city she fled amid the steeples and the domes, and running like a beggar on the marble piers, I chased her.”_

“And you said… you wish you could live here, in this bed… forever…” On bended knees on the mattress, and holding him straddle on his manhood, Thor blinked and gasped on the never fading delight of hearing him moan at his gentle shoves. “I wish… I could live inside you…” His hands on Loki’s waist, his eyes inebriated at Loki’s little grimaces of pleasure, he just let his sex vibrate in him, while he licked the smooth furrow along his stern. “…like this…” And in the blurred cloud of euphoria that had them seized he realized, more than he ever did in the past, that he could actually send to Hel everything else. “…forever.”  
They came together for the they didn’t know anymore which time, slowly, serenely, almost silently, Loki innocently smiling his shivers on his brother’s forehead, Thor trying to catch with yearning lips at least some beads from the prolonged spurt squirting from Loki’s sex before it rained down and moistened his abdomen.  
Running his hands on Loki’s alluring body, that was slightly panting after the measured pushes of his manhood, Thor just couldn’t make his own eyes sated with him.  
“Oh, you… _you_ … are a work of art,” he whispered, his thumbs lightly rubbing Loki’s nipples. “…and loving you is an amazing wonder. _We_ are an amazing wonder. Our making love is an amazing wonder. Nothing, with no-one else, could ever be comparable to.”

_“At the top of the road, near a wood of laurels, I wrapped her in her mass of veils, and felt a little of her immense body. Dawn and the child fell at the edge of the woods.”_

And yet, they didn’t have enough. Oh no, they didn’t. On the contrary, the more they got, the more they craved to get. In such a sweetly uncontrolled way that reminded Thor of their first night together, when Loki put a spell on them to make their having pleasure endless. But now it was even more overwhelming, because this time no spell was casted, everything happened… naturally. _Naturally_. As naturally as it was meant to be. And with that Loki, so genuinely happy, so translucent and spontaneous in his happiness that of that happiness Thor could almost see the multicoloured shades. His airy Loki, whose lips and tongue were now softly licking Thor’s chest and stomach clean from his own semen, sliding down little by little to reach and to explore his groin. Thor spread his legs out and took a deep warm sigh, leaning his back against the headboard, he smiled in peacefulness, and just let his little one go on in his awed quest.  
“I so need…” Loki muttered, effusing little kisses on that piece of marble that got stiff again under his curious tongue. “…to drink from you…” He sipped, intrigued, the little drop pouring from the top, still a bit hesitant, he smiled, so wishful. “…as you did from me… before…”  
At first he just grazed that glans with a quivering mouth, slightly uncertain on how things had to be managed; and Thor, catching his wavering, with his own hand drove his own manhood in a slow, careful path that sketched the profile of Loki’s lips. Loki felt it trembling with eagerness while skimming his mouth over and over again, and that induced him to wrap its top by instinct, soft as a veil. How surprising was the flavour of that incomparable gemstone. It smelled the strength of a rock, it tasted fire and gold; he caught on it the mix with the scent of his own body, and that made it so rare, so delightfully tempting… He had to slip his mouth further down, to feel its hugeness hardening, pulsating on his tongue and almost suffocating him with its craving, like a living creature pleading for his care. He ran his mouth up and down again and again, getting more and more confident as he heard Thor moaning deeply and as he felt his hand stroking his cheek.  
“Looks like…” Thor gasped, grabbing his nape and gently conducting his head’s movement on his sex. “…you… oh… didn’t forget…” His glans grazed Loki’s throat, he moaned again, he smiled in renewed ecstasy. “…really… everything…”  
It was the softest, the sweetest, the most devoted tune that Loki’s mouth had ever played on him, and so deluging in its total commitment that tears welled up in Thor’s eyes again. And an instant before he had to unleash his climax, a hand under Loki’s chin, the other again grabbing his own manhood, he pulled it almost out, slowly, and leant on Loki his eyes bright with emotion, to watch him nursing with delighted thoroughness the creamy gush he spilled and spilled and spilled on the warm nest of his tongue.  
“You… crying?” murmured Loki, once he regained the cosy shelter of his brother’s chest. He laid his lips on Thor’s, his lips still vaguely shaded with Thor’s flavour, searching his tongue to share with him the last tinge of his essence. Thor’s fingers intertwined in his hair, softly scratching his nape.   
“You make me feel…” Thor muttered “…the most blessed living being in the known universe.” He smiled on Loki’s awed look, and slightly nodded. “For that, yes… yes, little one, I’m crying.”  
Loki nestled in his arms, Thor cuddled him up, they closed their eyes and rested, just that, listening to the silence oozing with their scent all around.  
Neither of them ever let go of the other, not even for an instant, except for the few seconds when Thor – between a bunch of stolen kisses and strokes - got off the bed to go and pick one from Loki’s favourites books, as Loki at some point asked him to do.

_“When I awoke it was noon.”_

Loki sighed softly, closing the book after he whispered the last line right on Thor’s cheek.  
“This… is exactly… how I am feeling.”  
Thor was leaning on the headboard of their bed and Loki laid abandoned in his arms, nuzzled between his legs, his back leant on his bosom, his head against his neck. He rested for a while, relaxed. Then he turned his face upwards a bit, to look at his sweet god, and to get lost in his eyes.  
“You… are the dawn… I never hoped to see again.”  
The turmoil of their feelings had been replaced by a more placid, a more serene cloud of excitement, but not for that less burning.   
“Why… did you choose this one?” asked Loki, holding the book in one hand and with the other squeezing Thor’s fingers, that so delicately were rubbing his skin an inch above his groin.   
“Because I know… that you love poetry so much.” Thor’s voice was deep and warm blowing on Loki’s mouth those words that melted with the light shivers his hand went on whetting in him. “And through you… I learned to appreciate it as well.”  
Totally indulging to the little, reassuring heart of Thor’s manhood beating on his spine, Loki placed the book at his side and made himself more comfortable in his brother’s hug.  
Poetry.  
Such a fascinating new discovery.  
“You know so many things about me.”  
He held a little moan and blinked in relish, as Thor’s hand slid weightless a bit more down between his testis and thigh. Again, ecstatically disarmed in front of that reviving enchantment now blended with the nuances that the revelation of poetry enriched it with.  
“I want to write it down,” he breathed on Thor’s lips, waiting for him to turn that breath into a kiss.  
“What?” smiled Thor, palely startling, between the smooches he kept wetting his mouth with.  
With his back Loki caressed softly his chest, his lips stuck to his brother’s.  
“You. Me.” He moved his hips sensually, his stiffening sex craving for Thor’s grab, that Thor on purpose was tenderly delaying. “This.” Again, a kiss. _And the more yet to come._ “Everything.” _The endless more yet to come._ “So that I will never forget again.”  
Thor chuckled, touched by the lucid yearning he felt growing more and more desperate across his brother’s body.  
“You know, little one… we are supposed to engage… great challenges… soon…” he whispered on his mouth, both his hands now rubbing Loki’s inner thighs, with no actual intention to move a single muscle from that flawless snuggling.   
And when Thor’s fingers coiled his sex at last, Loki sighed deeply, he smiled, he tensed helplessly against his brother’s lap.  
“How… soon?”  
Thor closed his mouth with a kiss.  
Great challenges.  
Oh, yes. Thor was aware of that even too well.  
There was the need to light that sparkle up in Loki’s memories (but what if, he thought, what if together with his memories Loki had got back his dark side too? What would have happened then to that immaculate Loki, whom he already loved beyond the line? Oh, he thought right after, no matter what shape would acquire Loki’s soul. It was _his_ Loki. Before all that, it was _his Loki_ , as it was _his_ Loki now. As it would always be _his_ Loki). There was the need to manage the situation in Asgard. There was the ghost of a threat coming from the darkest of all Realms. There was the fate of the whole universe at stake.  
Then, above all, there was the pulsating ocean of their bed.  
Along with Thor’s caresses, that not even for a moment showed any will to stop, their bodies pressed more passionately against each other.  
Their bed.  
They smiled and winked at one another with perfect empathy.  
Their bed, which by then they had become one with, and that assuaged them with its embrace.  
Their bed, that reassured them that was a given: for the time being, everything else had simply… to wait.

***

 _“Loki!” Thor shouted, freezing at once on the top of the hill.  
A gorgeous, fifteen years-old-looking young warrior whose face and body were starting to show his godly lineage, even though still carrying the reckless freshness of adolescence. He looked down at the desert plain, where no sign of his brother was yet visible.  
“Where the Hel are you? Answer me!”  
He panted, wondering what could have driven Loki so mad that he ran away from the city like a mountain wolf a few minutes before his arrival, as the others told him as he got back. Thor hadn’t seen him in ages, for Odin stated his elder son had to spend a remarkable deal of time across the other Realms in order to enhance his knowledge and his skills as the fated future ruler of the Realm. He was missing Loki so much, he couldn’t wait to be back to Asgard to tell him about all the new adventures he came across and to hear from him what happened in their Realm in the meanwhile.  
He rushed down along the gentle slope, following the trail that Loki’s feet left on the lawn flattening the grass, calling his name over and over again. On the boundary of what he at once recognized as the Whispering Wood, he stopped. He looked around, upset and worried at the same time, he snorted, annoyed.  
“Loki!” he yelled again to the thin air towards the intricate tangle of the wood. “If this is one of your tricks, I swear you…”  
Nothing.  
However, the faint greener path his little brother created while running led straight into the wood.  
“You know we cannot enter the Whispering Wood!” His voice echoed around, and the leafage trembled. “It is unsafe!”  
He perfectly remembered the tales his father told him about that bewitched wood. They said the whispers of the trees could drive even the wisest mind delirious and force anyone lost forever, looking for a way out that actually didn’t exist. They said that wood – that from outside looked small and definitely limited –, once entered, revealed to have no end. They said only the mightiest sorcerers, and the infants still immune to any lure of self-awareness, could raise their look and see the real face of the creatures dwelling in that wood without being driven crazy.  
Unnerved, intrigued at once and mostly anxious for he could not get an answer from his brother (and he perfectly knew how easy it was for Loki to get into always new troubles), Thor grabbed the silver sword he was allowed to carry as a warrior of his age and ventured in, resolute like the best-accomplished berserk.  
As he moved the first step, it was like the wood itself took control of his body and pushed him forward. He gasped, as he started to hear the green around whispering directly to his mind in some unintelligible language. All of a sudden his head started eddying, his eyes blurring, and he had to call all of his strength to try and focus on the path, that was fluctuating in front of him in a sort of unstable in-between.  
“Loki!” he shouted again, and his own voice sounded to him like a clouded grumble, as if it came from elsewhere outside him and not from his own throat. _Is that you?… _, he was sure he heard, not a real voice, just the shadow of another whisper amongst the thousands whispers whirling in his head. The only one whose meaning he was able to understand, though. For without a doubt that was Loki whispering. Not even knowing why he did that then, he closed his eyes and begun running blindly, following an instinctive sensation he felt it would have led him to his brother.  
Careless of the living branches scratching his arms and legs and trying to stop his fitful rush, he forced himself not to listen to the growing jumble of screams confusing his mind, nor to the disturbing hunches that an unconscious sense of fear was unleashing in him, and kept on running.  
And finally, when he felt the brambles loosening their tangle and a warmer breeze grazing his face, he stopped, he opened his eyes wide and panted his surprise on the little glade that spread in front of him. The trees ran in perfect circle all around the turf, like some deity had put them there in that fashion on purpose, and improbable flowers, whose shapes and colours he didn’t remember he ever saw before, peeked out here and there, making the place fairy.  
And as he entered the glade and saw his brother, the trees stopped whispering at once.  
Loki stood right in the middle, still, his lids clamped, his arms tensed along his flanks, his fists convulsively clasped, his green light robe softly waving in the halo of light surrounding him and generating – Thor guessed, vaguely distressed as every time he saw his little brother dealing with magic – directly from his body.  
His… body.  
Different.  
Surprising.  
Unexpected.  
Without understanding how it was happening, Thor held his breath, petrified before a reaction from his own heart he’d never anticipated. The kid he left home when he had to depart, that kid, so tiny and frail in his memories, was no more there. That kid was grown. And grown incredibly… beautiful. An incredibly beautiful young creature, whose ethereal body and whose ravishing face talked the unique mixture of godhood, magic and troubled grace that Loki was made of. Not yet able to give a proper name to that staggering beauty, nor to the unforeseen feelings that beauty all of a sudden unleashed in his soul, Thor simply kept looking at Loki in a way he never fancied possible before.  
Even more dazed when Loki, clearly catching his presence, opened his lids, startled at his sight, let the enchanted aura disappear and looked at him with the same bewildered eyes.  
“You’re… back…” whispered Loki, the hint of a smile sweetening his lips.   
Thor moved a couple of steps towards him, smelling his scent among the dozens permeating that glade in the Whispering Wood. He never paid attention to his scent before, at least not in a conscious way. Now, it was his scent making itself manifest and penetrating Thor’s nostrils on its own, with its blended fragrances that made it so unequalled. Even his voice was changed. Still imbued with the hues of youth, but at the same time wrapped in a deeper shade, so softly pregnant, so… captivating. And in his eyes, so intensely rich for someone in any case so young, a new multifaceted awareness adumbrated a depth of knowledge that wasn’t there the last time Thor saw him.  
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere…” Thor said at last, regaining lucidity. “Why did you run from the city? Why here?”  
And only then, he noticed: Loki’s lips were healing from a cut and on his ivory cheekbone a bruise was slowly disappearing. He frowned, he raised a hand to reach and graze the wounds, “You’ve been injured?”, but Loki edged his face away, suddenly surly.  
“It’s nothing.”  
He sat down on the grass, shaking his head to move his hair aside, his long, black, silky hair that caressed his neck like a scarf weaved from the night. Thor sat by his side, huffing, staring at him and glossing over his still being incapable to manage properly the closeness of the revelation of that beauty.  
“Tell me what happened, Loki.”  
Loki gritted his teeth, and his face was seized by a sudden grimace of anger.  
“You’ve been away for such a long time. You can’t imagine how tedious those damn bastards have grown.”  
“Which… bastards?”  
“My ‘training mates’. The other ‘noble sons’ of Asgard. Practicing hand-to-hand fighting with me in the training yard, this morning.” His voice now sounded callously sarcastic. “Their nobleness showed up at its best when they called me ‘a slutty Jotun witch’ and jumped on me like rabid dogs, all against one.”  
As he heard that, Thor felt a rush of rage burning inside his body and overpowering any other emotion. It was never an easy thing for anyone to deal with Loki, not even for himself, he knew quite well; he also knew, though, that since they were little children Loki had always been watched with prior mistrust by everybody else, because of his heritage, and because of his early – and often mismanaged - magic skills. So many times Thor had to take a stand in his defence, for it was not an option that he could allow any kind of abuse on his little brother, it never was and it would never be. Even being aware that behind a guiltless attitude Loki could always be disguising something else. And not necessarily righteous. That was his nature, that was what made him so hard to understand, but that was also what made him… Loki. And precisely because he was so far from that complex of habits, and so intrigued by that, Thor always felt the bond linking the two of them stronger than any other; a bond that – among the other countless things - made him the only one who could tell Loki anything… and be listened to.  
“Did you play some trick on them?”  
So many times he tried to make him understand there was a line that should not be overstepped, well aware Loki’s reactions could often be uncontrolled.  
And as a matter of fact, the sudden gaze Loki raised on him was burning wrath.  
“Of course, you too! Long time no see, but always there!”, he yelled. “First thing you think, ‘he cheated’! You are the same as them!”  
Thor didn’t lower his eyes, determined.  
“Did you?”  
Loki grumbled, searching for the right words to retort, that didn’t come to him. He snorted.  
“Alright, I did, I did. But I just…” He couldn’t hold a titter. “…at some point… I made the ground disappear under the feet of one of them, that’s all.”  
There, Thor sighed deeply.  
“I knew it. You’ll never learn, will you?”  
“He was winning on me!” he uttered, so close to Thor’s mouth that Thor could almost breathe his soul. “They’re good at fighting and I’m good at magic, why shouldn’t I use it? I didn’t hurt anybody! And they, instead, they attacked me like they were out to kill me! I…” He bent his head, dismayed at once. “…I felt their hatred inside my veins, Thor. So strong, so deep… so hurting… more hurting than their punches and kicks themselves...”  
He fell silent for a couple of seconds, panting. The dejection on his face marred his beauty and looked so painful that Thor had to raise his hand and stroke his hair, in a gesture that carried far more sweetness than he consciously intended to. He didn’t know if Loki caught that sweetness, or the irrepressible, slight shiver that went along with that stroke.  
“You know what they say?” Loki went on, a bitter smile on his mouth. “They say my magic makes me a coward. They say I’ll never be an Aesir warrior.” He directed his sight to the farthest border of the glade, where the trees seemed to wink at him with their trembling crowns. “Because that is not what witches… what Jotun witches… are meant to become.”  
Thor grabbed his shoulder and shook him gently.  
“You are not… a witch. And you are not a coward.” How genuine sounded the deep warmth in his voice. “You have the power of sorcery, but that does not mean you can’t become a warrior. We both know how good you are with your daggers. Or with your arch and arrows. You should just learn not to use your magic skills when it’s not needed.”  
Loki just turned a scornful pair of eyes on him.  
“You see? You also hate my tricks.”  
“Did I say that? I don’t hate your tricks, you idiot. I like them instead, when they come not to pester someone else… getting you into troubles.” He smiled. “Your magic powers make you amazing. The most amazing little brother in the Nine Realms.”  
The spontaneous glee suddenly sparkling in Loki’s eyes at his last words wrapped Thor’s young heart in a bubble of instinctive appeasement.  
“And most of all,” he went on, a stateliness in his voice that sounded uncommon for a boy of his age “you are exactly as Aesir as I am.”  
Loki shook his head, vaguely wistful.  
“You know I’m not. _I am _different._ We _are different. Look at us.” He raised his hand to touch the long blond lock that skimmed Thor’s cheek. “You are the sun, I am the night. You are the golden strength of the light…” He sighed, disheartened. “…and I am the black tricks of the darkness.”  
Thor grabbed his wrists and squeezed them, holding them tight in his hands, while he kept smiling with the most sincere zeal.  
“You’re right. But think of this.” His eyes plunged deeply in Loki’s, keeping them locked into their ultimate transparency, while he let out the words that followed straight from his inmost soul. “What would be the sun without the night? And what would be the light without the darkness?”  
He saw Loki’s eyes dampening lightly, he saw a speechless smile trembling on his lips, he gloated and quivered and gasped inside when Loki threw his arms around his neck and clasped him in a wild, glaring embrace.  
“Oh, Thor, your sweetness…” Loki muttered, without loosening his grip. “…makes you so… cuddly…” And giggled, cheerful again. “…the most cuddly big brother in the Nine Realms. And further.”  
_“Your sweetness.” _  
So it was tangible, Thor thought, slightly embarrassed. He grabbed Loki’s shoulders, making him detach from that hug, but he kept him close, to let him stare at the haughty look he forced on his own face.  
“I am not… ‘sweet’.” He stated, seriously, proudly. “And I am not ‘cuddly’. I am strong. And if I had been there with you, in the training yard, I’d let them see how the son of Odin manages a fight.”  
Loki nodded, absolutely persuaded on that, and leant on him his endearing green eyes full of sincere respect.  
“I wish I had you there. You are the strongest of all.” How sassy that gaze was also, by the way, how flattering. “I want you to teach me how to become that strong. Will you?”  
On his little brother’s cheeky smirk Thor for an instant felt his own heart missing a beat.  
“S-sure,” he stammered, shaking that veil of abashment off from his soul at once.  
“Well, anyway…” Loki went on, silver-tongued, searching for his complicity. “I arranged a little prank for them.” He sneered. “Tonight, when they will go to bed… their sheets will turn into snakes. I’m sure I’ll hear them screaming like little girls all across Asgard.”  
Unable to hold a chuckle at that idea, his hand on his brow, Thor shook his head.  
“Oh no, tell me you didn’t.”  
The persisting impudent look on Loki’s face sufficed as an answer. And they laughed again.  
“By the way, Loki,” Thor went at some point “why did you ran here? With all the other safer places you could hide into? If hiding was actually that necessary.”  
Pensive again, Loki played absently with a clump of grass between his feet.  
“Because none of those morons would have followed me here, they are all scared by this place.” He grabbed Thor’s forearm, smiling at him. “But not you. You are so… fearless. I’m glad you came.”  
Though being both just little more than two boys, though they hadn’t seen each other in a long, long while, Thor knew him so well he caught from the sparkle in his eyes that Loki was plotting something.  
“We really shouldn’t be here. Father says this place is forbidden. And dangerous.”  
Loki shrugged, clearly aware of Thor didn’t know what sort of mysteries.  
“Well, he is wrong. This place is incredible.”  
Sprawling on the grass, his arms crossed under his head, Thor widened his gaze on the tops of the trees around.  
“I was wondering… why did the trees stop whispering as I entered this glade and… saw you?”  
Loki laid down at his side, gloating like he was foretasting Thor’s reaction at his next words.  
“Because they know me.”  
Halfway between being worried and intrigued, Thor turned a questioning look on him.  
“You mean… you’ve been here… before?”  
Loki grinned smugly.   
“I followed the master sorcerers here last month.”  
Aghast at once, Thor lifted his head and uttered right on his face.  
“You did… what?!”  
“Don’t get mad, now… They didn’t see me.” He grinned again. “I can manage and cloak myself from anybody, if I want to.” And winked at him. “Even from you.”  
“Yes, fine, you little trickster. And doing that… you disobeyed father’s rules. Again.”  
Loki chuckled.  
“Oh, because you never disobey him, right?” He leered at the guilty expression Thor couldn’t hide, and at his awkward sudden looking elsewhere. “By the way, he’ll never find out.”  
They stayed silent for a while, lying on the grass, listening to the soft rustle of the leaves around and savouring the natural sense of fulfilment coming from the closeness of their bodies. Thor was still wondering how could that place, so quiet, so relaxing and so beautiful, be actually dangerous as everybody said, when Loki’s voice wrapped him again in a cloud of arcane softness.  
“I want to show you something.”  
Thor just turned his face a bit to glance at his profile, that in the smooth light seeping through the foliage appeared almost unreal. Without his realizing that, his eyes then fell on the corner of skin that the low-necked vest let him espy on Loki’s chest. How pale. How silky that skin looked, how precious, in the slight ups and downs while Loki breathed, how… tempting. There, as if he just caught the unmeant intensity of that gaze, Loki tilted his head in turn, slowly, until his eyes met Thor’s and flooded them, making his brother shiver and try to contain the tangle that all of a sudden gripped his stomach. Because those eyes, Thor simply saw that, those huge green eyes were now looking at him in the same new, freakish way. And a shameless, compliant smirk lingered on those thin lips before Loki spoke again.  
“What?”  
“Nothing,” Thor muttered, confused. “I was just… You’re just…”  
On his awkward hesitation Loki giggled, amused. Intrigued.  
“Well, then?... I’m just?…What?”  
Thor cleared his throat, blaming his own self for being unable to restrain that unpredictable stream of feelings.   
“…grown very…” He hummed. “…good-looking.”  
Turning on his flank and laying his most alluring gaze on him, Loki then spoke charging his voice with such a lechery that Thor struggled to keep his own breath calm.  
“Oh, you think so?” Indefinable, as usual, if he was joking or not. “You make me blush.” But with no doubt his eyes talked smugness. “You too are far more… gorgeous…” And genuine enthrallment. “…than the last time I saw you.” He ran his fingers along Thor’s naked arm, so sensually that he gave his brother a rush of unmeant gooseflesh. “Look at these muscles.”  
“Stop it!” Thor laughed, pulling him gently back down on the grass.  
“I mean it!” Loki retorted, seriously resentful.  
They kept looking at each other for an endless while, speechless, and conscious that between the two of them something most unforeseen was actually going on; but yet, too blurry, too unexpected and untidy to let them figure it out. So then, as one, they yielded to the light-heartedness of their youth and let their souls release into a freeing laughter.  
“So, what did you mean…” Thor went after a while “…you wanted to show me something?”  
Loki was now totally relaxed, his eyes lost looking at the circle of sky widening over the tops of the trees.  
“When I followed them here,” he said “I saw the sorcerers doing a really, really extraordinary thing…” He smiled. “…and I learned how to do it by myself.”  
“You… learned?” Thor frowned, surprised. “By yourself? But you’re still too young… You don’t have the power to… learn by yourself… something only the master sorcerers can do. Not yet.” But the telling, leery look on Loki’s face erased any doubt from his mind. “…do you?”  
Not actually sure if he had to admire him or to fear him, Thor just waited for his brother to speak further. And when Loki took a deep breath, blowing the softest…  
“Look.”  
…in the air, and smiled to the sky starting to whisper some words at first hardly intelligible, from that moment on the most stunning prodigy Thor could ever imagine befell right before his eyes.  
At the sound of Loki’s voice, the trees around began trembling.  
“Your roots. My feet.  
To make our essence join.”  
While he was speaking, his index drew a rune of light right in the air over their faces. The trees shook their crowns, whispering softly. That was Uruz, Thor recognized it even in the awe of that revelation, the rune of great will. It vanished slowly into a silver dust after a little while.  
“Your sap. My blood.  
To make our hearts combine.”  
Loki’s finger drew again, and that was Wunjo, the rune of ecstasy. From beneath their recumbent bodies to the border of the glade, all the grass swished and began sparkling, brighter, and brighter. And louder grew the whispers of the trees, while what was grass until a few minutes before was now turning into… something else.  
“Your voice. My voice.  
To make our whispers sing.”  
In front of Thor’s incredulous eyes, Eihwaz, the rune of trust and faith, the rune of Yggrasil appeared under Loki’s thin index. And there the trees, touched by the sparkling entity that the grass had become, emitted all in unison an unspeakable sound and started to change as well.  
“From Yggdrasil we come.  
Laþu. Laþu. Laþu.”  
As the third rune disappeared Loki closed his eyes, repeating that last magical word over and over again. What happened from then on left Thor simply dumbfounded. The trees were no more trees, but new undefined beings, made of pure light and moving their trunks and branches – now looking like sinuous tentacles, glimmering ribbons twirling all around as if they were inspecting the unusual presence of two creatures not belonging to their dimension – in an improbable dance.  
And then, their whispers became… a song.  
Not a melody that could be identified by known keys, nor ever heard, not even thinkable; it was a song and the opposite of a song, as it was music and the opposite of music. Several voices running after each other in an intricate canon which gave life to a baffling harmony, one of a kind Thor was sure not even the mightiest gods could think as possible. An unearthly, implausible orchestration that - while grazing the two of them with their floating annexes of light – those entities spread right under Thor’s skin, inside his body, along his veins, making him feel _relieved _, he didn’t know from what, and weirdly…_ welcomed _.  
Caught in that maze of wonders, Thor hardly managed to keep his thought and feelings separated from the twirl of magic that was turning his inner self upside down; the words that formed that song were still obscure, if they were even words, but as the song went on Thor realized he could recognize the voices. For the trees uttered a peculiar sound, the leaves another one, the flowers yet another; and along with the song that unique choir was delighting them with, among the unfathomable tangle of flaring creepers swirling on their bodies, he was sure he saw wafting eyes, and oozing faces, and tinkling winged beings. Appearing and disappearing, just hints of something higher whose deepest essence would remain irremediably precluded.  
His eyes wide open, Thor turned his head, slowly, to look at Loki, sprawled right at his side: what an amazing, powerful prodigy his little brother was, Thor realized to the full just then. And wrapped in that enchanted mixture of light and magic and music Loki was without fail the most ravishing thing he ever saw. A smile of fulfilment sparkled on his face, his black hair glistened in the glimmering whiteness, his pearly skin looked even more rare, even more… tantalizing.  
There, and Thor’s heart had a jump right as it happened, Loki’s hand reached his own on the grass, his fingers tangled together with his ones, _What are you doing? _, Thor thought, bewildered,_ We’re gods, we’re warriors, gods and warriors do not hold each other’s hand… _, again he looked at Loki and he saw him perfectly serene, his eyes still closed, his smile still there, like what he just did were the most natural of all things in the universes._ Just… relax, and let them know you. Let them sing to your soul _, he heard Loki whisper in his mind, so sweetly, so warmly. So, Thor as well gradually relaxed, holding Loki’s hand tight in his own, and feeling more and more content in doing that; and at that point, for an instant, confused, amazed and trapped into that swoon of unreality, for just an instant in his young and unprepared heart he skimmed - and then let go as fast as it occurred, because it still was too an unconceivable and scaring thing to deal with - the awareness that in his life, in his life taken in its entire wholeness, there could not be anyone else… but Loki._

“That was the first incredible thing…” Thor whispered on Loki’s cheek “…that I saw through your eyes, little one. The first in my whole life.” He giggled, shaking his head slightly. “You drove me… stunned.”  
On that same grass, in that same glade of that same wood, they just enjoyed the embrace of the trees silently towering them while they sat between one another’s legs in the middle of the field, nestled in each other’s arms. That was the first stage in the journey across their memories in which Thor planned to take his little one; that distant day in the Whispering Wood still carried so much meaning that he was sure some glint of it had to be still there, in Loki’s severed memories.  
He breathed Loki’s skin, remembering how devastating were his feelings that day now so far away in their past. He smiled.  
“And that was the first time… I realized you were _the one_.” He kissed his cheekbone, softly. “Even if then I was not able to… understand.”  
Loki tensed his back against Thor’s chest, the tip of his nose rubbing the skin behind his brother’s ear.  
“I wonder… how I was feeling, that day.”  
Thor smiled on his brow, tenderly.  
“I’m sure you felt the same as me, little one.”  
“I almost saw… and felt… everything happening while you were talking,” said Loki, an intrigued smile on his mouth. “I can’t believe I had such powers…”  
“You still have,” Thor stated, his fingers under Loki’s chin to make him turn his face a little, to look into his eyes and sink in them. “They are just… dormant. Remember what I told you? There’s a place that only you can enter, and in that place everything will be restored. I’ll bring you there, as soon as the smallest memory comes back to your mind.”  
On the brief silence that followed, Thor leant a little kiss on his lips, slowly, carefully. In the few days that came after their recapture of intimacy, they could hardly tolerate to stay away from each other more than the distance that allowed them to be in physical contact, even if only through their hands; and in those few days they still avoided to meet anyone else, searching instead for always new hidden places where to unleash their burning lust. Thor didn’t forget, anyway, the growing need to make Loki remember, as Loki himself showed more and more crave for giving a consistent form to the cluttered muddle of feelings garbling his soul. They talked a lot, in those few days, Thor told him of their past days, of their past friends, of their adventures; he told him of their dreams and of their nightmares, he told him of the prodigies, of the battles, of Odin and of Jotunheim, constantly waiting to see glimmering in Loki’s eyes that sparkle he was so earnestly longing for and that instead didn’t seem yet ready to appear.  
However, the enlivening rapture of being together again in such a new and cheerful way overpowered anything else within the colours of flawless gratification, keeping even the slightest shadow of angst relentlessly away.   
Also that sunny afternoon in the Whispering Wood, on Loki’s fascinated look after Thor’s telling and on Thor’s arms tenderly encircling his waist, everything floated buoyant, while Thor’s hand softly brushed Loki’s tummy under the light clothes. No matter if Loki still could not remember, he would eventually; there was no rush, and that delightful walk into their memories had just begun.  
“And…” Loki went at some point, laying a sprightly childish gaze on Thor’s face “…can you do that magic with the trees again?”  
Thor giggled sweetly.  
“No, little one, I can’t.” His thumb grazed Loki’s cheek. “I perfectly remember the magic words you said, and the runes of light you drew in the air. But I am not a sorcerer. You are.”  
Vaguely disappointed for an instant, Loki then looked at him with a big smile, that let his canny idea shine through.  
“The trees did not stop us, when you took me here… then they must still know me… as they know you…” He grabbed Thor’s hands, excited. “So, say those magic words, I’ll say them after you…” His candid thrill grew irrepressible. “Let’s try!”  
Thor couldn’t help but being overwhelmed by that glaring excitement, and by the will of granting him that wish. _It might work, in fact_ , he thought, still a bit sceptical, _it might be…_ and at last he complied: he said the words, echoed by Loki, he drove his brother’s hand in drawing in the air the magic runes. How surprising, when he saw vague hints of them trying to take form in spite of everything, as though the mere presence of Loki was enough to allow that marvel to happen. And how befuddling, when against any of his expectations the whole miracle of the trees came true again. His heart oozed endless poignancy, for that could mean just one thing: it was the evidence the very essence of his Loki was still there, hidden under a cloak of unawareness, but still there, still powerful as always. And screaming its greed to be awakened.  
He filled his eyes with the rapture in which his speechless Loki, flooded by the living light and gasping his amazement among the glaring stripes and the unreal song that again penetrated into their souls, let his whole self get lost. Thor shivered to the marrow, because, exactly as it happened that day so distant now, he never saw him so beautiful before.  
The mix of pulsating brightness and improbable voices singing, surrounding them in a cloud of surreal strokes, seemed to invite them to move their gazes from the unearthly event onto each other’s face, to share a wonder that went far beyond that magic. Enraptured, Thor skimmed Loki’s cheek with trembling fingers, he grazed his neck, he softly brushed his shoulders, he opened his vest and freed his skin, that was becoming living light itself; Loki sighed in the glare, his eyes locked into Thor’s, slowly approaching his craving lips to touch upon his brother’s and linger on them with the prelude to a magical charm all of their own.  
“Now there is something else… I know for certain…” he muttered on Thor’s tongue, blended between the shining tunes spreading all around. “Maybe magic can create incredible things…” His cheek caressed Thor’s cheek, sensually. “…but there is no magic… more incredible…” His mouth slid on Thor’s neck, making him quiver. “…than this…” He quivered. “…than you and I.”  
They lost their breath into a kiss that savoured of pure brightness. Lulled by those whispers of light, they fell weightless on the sparkling meadow and they loved on the border of the unreal, putting the missing tile in place to complete a jigsaw that had been left unfinished since their boyhood.   
When the prodigy faded out in unison with them wafting down sweetly from a climax that once again revealed to be unique and peerless, they just rested there, inebriated with ecstasy, their bare bodies laced on the grass, now green again and fresh under their skin. Almost reluctantly, the sun disappeared behind the whooshing crowns, and the cosy half-light of the twilight wrapped them in a mantle of pure perfection.  
And when the night fell, some hours or some millennia later, Thor was still laying his head abandoned on Loki’s tummy, spreading little kisses on it every now and then, while Loki’s fingers never stopped running airily through his golden hair. They didn’t say a word for ages, committing themselves to the silence of the wood, mildly interrupted in stops and starts by the soft rustling of those that now were simple trees again.  
Until, like it was coming from another dimension, Loki’s voice added to that dream, already soaked with entrancement, the final and most astounding drop of wonder.  
“I wish I had enough power on words…” He just _felt_ he had to say that, because if there was one single thing definitely clear in the chaos of his maimed soul, that was the consciousness of the love he felt for Thor. “…to create new ones… expressly to tell you…” He whispered those words so naturally that Thor, at first, didn’t tumble to it. “…how much I love you.” _**(1)**_  
Then, wincing at once, Thor startled, his heart hastening his beating.  
He stood on his knees and grasped Loki’s arms, lifting him from the grass to grab and hold his head in his hands and plant a sanguine look into his eyes.  
“Little one…” he panted. “What… what you just said?”

\---  
 _ **(1) See[“Until that night”, Chapter 10](http://archiveofourown.org/works/609847/chapters/2145157).**_


	6. Fragments in motion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a whole new future laying in front of them. But there’s also an unparalleled menace threatening it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I needed to make this chapter a sort of junction between the two main narrative parts of my story, so here things are just set in motion and nothing really crucial yet happens; but it will.

_Nothing was visible in the place that laid forgotten beyond any conceit and history; the place where life and death carried no meaning, for there the ancestral power of godhood melted with pristine magic to fade perpetually into creation and destruction; the place where, since the beginning of time and space, time and space were nothing but a foolish joke.  
There, disturbing the dust of millennia that oblivion made still from time immemorial, the echo of their presence quivered unsuspected.  
“Why did you risk to open this godforsaken passage just to ask for our hearing?” said he.  
“Because this is the only way for us to cross the border,” she answered. “And we may have an interesting deal to propose.”  
The plumbean darkness trembled around, almost alive, almost annoyed.  
“Then speak,” said he, and waited.  
She spoke.  
And, after she had spoken, there was no room left except for silence.  
Silence.  
“You are aware of the things this will move, I presume,” said he, when that silence at last threatened to become eternal.  
“We are. And you should better rely on that as well.”_

The look on Loki’s face right after Thor’s words adumbrated a sudden rush of sadness.  
“You…” he muttered “…you don’t believe me?”  
Thor smiled, touched by that candid resentment, and stroked his cheek sweetly.  
“Oh, little one, of course I believe you.” The warmth of the nightly wood still surrounded their bare bodies with gentle invisible hands. “I didn’t mean that.”  
He pushed his sight deeper into Loki’s eyes to catch the sign of a recovered awareness that instead he felt keeping on slipping away, he couldn’t get why.   
“The night you… died…” he whispered “…you came to me in a dream… and told me these same words… these same words exactly.”  
Loki frowned with surprise.  
“…in a dream?”  
Thor nodded, while his hand rested on the delicate curve between Loki’s neck and shoulder.  
“After the magic dagger sucked your life and soul away, I guess that was the only way for you to talk to me. A dream.”  
They stayed silent, letting their gazes penetrate into one another’s to try to dig out more. But the little grimace of frustration on Loki’s face just let out his powerlessness before the foggy chaos he couldn’t manage yet.  
“I’m… I’m feeling a mess of… ghosts… stirring inside my mind…” he muttered, shaking his head lightly. “But still I can’t catch a single image… It’s so… distressing…” He laid his cheek on Thor’s shoulder, searching for the reassurance of his embrace. “How long will it take me to remember, Thor?”  
Thor strengthened his grip around his body, breathing on his breath, to make him feel the wrap of cosmic safety.  
“It will take you as long as you need,” he whispered on Loki’s hair, smiling in confidence. “And I am sure it won’t be so much, now.”

_“We will send a bringer of bane to get things going,” said she. “And you will grant him the entry.”  
He gritted his teeth in front of her arrogance, but she sniggered insouciant.  
“Restrain your hubris, and clear your hazy mind,” she insisted “for as things stand, we are sure this is the only chance you have left to take an action.”  
“I will allow him in through the passage under the third root of Yggdrasil,” he grumbled, and then he grinned, sarcastic. “Make sure your doomed rat is prepared for such a risky task.”  
“He is.”  
The thickness of non-existence all around had grown almost oppressive to both of them.  
“And remember,” she added at the end. “He is not what he looks like.”_

The golden dome of Heimdall’s abode shined immense over Thor’s head when he overstepped the threshold, followed by a baffled Loki. For the first time since they got back from Hel, Loki was entering that unique part of Asgard, and the renewing wonder sparkling in his eyes would have been mead to Thor’s soul, hadn’t the reasons compelling him there been so troublesome. More days had passed since when he took Loki to the Whispering Wood, more stories about their own life he had told him, and nothing had yet substantially changed in Loki’s perception of his past. They even tried again to open and read Thor’s journal – Thor was sure that would have helped more than anything else -, but still that looked like something precluded.  
Right in the middle of the shiny room the All-Seer stood like a statue, looking at them as if he had been waiting for their coming since weeks.  
His eyes followed their steps while they got closer, and never blinked; and then they fixed austere on Thor’s face, tense in a mess of doubts that seemed to have no way out.  
“Yes, Thor, you’re doing well with him,” Heimdall answered the question that Thor hadn’t yet asked. “The way across your mutual memories is the best one to walk.”  
Thor felt his brother pressing himself against his side, in silence; even if Loki was getting more and more accustomed to the incredible things and people happening and living in that amazing Realm, yet that imposing man, whose impenetrable eyes could pass through his inner soul and see who knew how far beyond it, yet that man gave him the shivers. So, he let Thor speak without cutting in, he listened to him telling Heimdall about the magic with the trees, about the dream, about the words that he so instinctively said without realizing from where they came to him.  
“…I wonder why he still cannot remember,” Thor ended with a growing veil of vexation encumbering his voice. “Those were the words he said when…”  
“Because that was a dream, and not reality.” Heimdall interrupted him abruptly. His blank gaze then peered at Loki, forcing him to hold his breath. “You are coming through, Loki, and you can feel it. But what you need is a splinter from your real life, not from your dreams.”  
That was the first time that Heimdall talked to him directly, and Loki blinked, on the unquestionable confidence he caught in his voice; moreover, Thor seemed to trust that man. _Then so will I_ , he stated, and when the All-Seer leavened a bit the intensity of his look and cracked a smile, Loki was actually sure that man could be reliable.  
“Nonetheless,” Heimdall went on, clearly catching his thoughts and clearly avoiding to dwell upon them, like they were just an obvious consequence in the higher order of things “dreams always share a drop of substance with reality. And always help.”  
He paused for a while, as though what he was seeing through the now questioning look in Loki’s eyes was too much yet to be revealed. And then again, his cryptic gaze moved into Thor’s.  
“He will remember, eventually.”  
At once, his sight raised over their heads, as though something that he alone could see all of a sudden came manifest, catching him unprepared. Both Thor and Loki raised their eyes in turn and, though not seeing anything and though not understanding, they could plainly feel that _something_ was... foreboding.  
“This comes unforeseen,” Heimdall resumed after a while. “Maybe things... are moving faster than we expected.”  
“What do you see, Gate-Keeper?” Thor burst out, fed up with all that riddle talking. “Can’t you just talk to us openly, for a change? Can’t you...”  
Heimdall turned on him a surly gaze.  
“Maybe _eventually_ will not be early enough,” he ruled, without a scuff scratching his composure, and focused his eyes on Loki. “Maybe he needs some _different help_ to enhance his perceiving ability and reach his inner soul again, so that his secret shelter can return him his powers.”  
Holding his brother’s arm through the soft sleeve of his clothing, Thor kept him close to himself, to reassure him after he saw a shadow of concern showing up on his face.  
“Some _different help_? What are you talking about?”  
Heimdall’s eyebrow raised, as though that question had the power to make him feel almost mocked.  
“You perfectly know what I am talking about, Thor.”  
Thor opened his mouth and then he deeply grumbled, unable to retort. Yes, he had to admit to himself, he perfectly knew. As he perfectly knew he didn’t intend to do anything of the sort. Loki frowned, seeing the upset look on his sweet god’s face, but still he remained silent, for he did not understand. He searched for the confidence of Thor’s eyes, he found it there, unshakable, he drowned into it.  
“It’s alright, little one,” Thor whispered, fighting the urge he felt to kiss him breathless. He just smiled sweetly at his confused expression, he veiled his cheek with a soft stroke, and then looked back at the All-Seer. “No way, Heimdall. We will try anything else before that last resort.”  
Heimdall didn’t reply, knowing he could do nothing to change Thor’s mind.  
“Now.” Resolution shined on Thor’s face like the northern sun rising on the Bifrost. “I won’t ask it again.” The might of lightning sparkled invulnerable through the blue of his gaze, to remind Heimdall he was – at that time – the most powerful among all the gods in Asgard. “Tell me what’s going on.”  
The deep breath that Heimdall took before speaking again betrayed an instant of vague animosity.  
“Fine.”  
He measured his words, as he calibrated the tone of his voice.  
“Odin has just fallen from his lunacy into his reinvigorating sleep.” He nodded calmly at Thor’s sudden apprehension. “But this time... it is not just to replenish his health and powers.” His hands strengthened their grip on his golden sword’s hilt with unusual vigour. “This time... he did it following a devious purpose.”  
The silence that fell after those words filled up with ominous premonitions. Loki kept his eyes locked on his god’s worried face, feeling a growing anguish running across his bowels, for even if he still did not remember anything about the almighty ruler of that Realm, he remembered quite well what Thor told him in the days that followed his coming back from Hel. And that, hadn’t he got Thor’s love and strength there by his side, that would have scared him to death. Because he knew that Odin, the All-Father, the one who took him from his Realm of birth to grow him like a son, was also the one who ordered the magic dagger forged. The one who more than any other wanted him dead.  
“What... purpose?” Thor asked, detracting Loki from his troubling thoughts.  
“The ancient Book of Oblivion that writes itself along with Aesir forgotten dooms is now filling new pages,” Heimdall answered. “But I cannot say precisely what Odin’s purpose is.” He paused, on Thor and Loki peering into his eyes and now breathing as one. “I know that such a thing never happened before. I know that in arranging this Odin is not alone.” He moved his sight from one to the other. “And I know someone is coming. Someone who is not what he looks like.”

_When the foreign child that was alive and wasn’t reached the main entrance to the city of Asgard, the sun was grazing the horizon, unaware, in a cascade of red in all its shades.  
No-one around paid the slightest attention to him, and no-one could, for he walked silently and paltry in-between the rims of worlds, wrapped in his shabby cape that looked like being woven from the ashes of the bones of the forgotten dead.   
For he could not act in the daylight – that was not a condition he could share -, he waited until the last shade of light turned into darkness; sat on the bulwark that edged the highest yard in Asgard, he then raised his sight to the sky.  
Unseen.  
Unheeded.  
The smallest, the farthest over the horizon, the one that shined more faintly so that no-one could notice, that was the first star he swallowed.  
Unregarded.  
Unperceived.  
And then again he mingled with the crowd, tiny, and hunched under the burden of his secrets; too heavy they’d have been for anyone, and even more for a child: but not for him, because being a child at the same time he wasn’t. Could anyone see his face, invisible beneath the heavy hood, could anyone see his eyes, it would have been blatant.  
But no-one was meant to see his face.  
As no-one was meant to see his eyes.  
Except the one he had been sent for._

The day that followed went by with no major hindrance.  
Thor delayed his idea to go and check the real condition of his father, as he delayed telling Loki more about that _different help_ Heimdall suggested. He needed to think, he needed to put together the messy tiles of a status that with no doubts he highly contributed to cause - though what he did was inescapable and though he would have done the same for countless times again -, and that now had to be managed. After the last events, and mostly after his talk with the All-Seer, his mind was quite confused. Duties, bad omens, threats, responsibilities, fragments in motion of a way bigger picture, were now menacing his flawless gratification for having Loki there with him again. He perfectly knew he had to take a stand, and he could not escape that; he also knew that was for the best of everyone, and above all for his and Loki’s best, for the future that laid ahead them both; and moreover, he somehow missed the fighting, even if since a long time already the ‘fighting’ he most craved for was the one with his Loki, in their bed.  
There had always been a diversion that more than any other had the power to free his mind and vent his troubles out. So, he took Loki with him in a mad ride across the moor and then in a wild hunting in the woods. They did it so many times in their past, since they were boys. And like so many times in their past, they ran rashly between the trees and bushes, they chased any sort of beast jumping up and down the steep tracks, and then for fun they rushed after each other, they laughed, they screamed, they ran and ran until their lungs exploded, they laughed again, again they screamed, sprightly, like they were never happier.   
Loki found out he was a skilled archer, his arrows did not miss a single shot, not even when he fired while running, and Thor just gloated in seeing him so joyful. They spent the entire morning across the forest, stopping just for a while to light up a bonfire and eat some from their preys; then, horseback again, aimlessly, just for the sake of flying on the wave of mirth.  
They ended up in a place where – Thor told Loki with a touch of tenderness in his voice - they used to hole up when they felt the urge to avoid people, a hidden glade not far from Yggdrasil’s big roots and yet know to the two of them alone. That was the only corner around Yggdrasil where no snake dwelt the cracks grooving the primordial roots, and it was Loki – Thor told him – the one who discovered it ages before, being able to understand the language of the snakes.  
No grass was greener and no trees’ foliage lusher than there, where the tree of life grounded its undying roots; and the timeless ash from which all life got lymph spread his crown so wide all around that it overshadowed the sun.   
That place oozed arcane magic more than any other, Loki could feel it even without his powers, as it smelled more ancient than any mind – even a god’s one – could conceive; furthermore, it was beautiful beyond any possible word, and probably there were no words meant to exist in order to describe it. Loki just sat on the grass, smiling, he leant his back against one of the roots’ gnarls, lulled by the murmur of the brook flowing thereabout. From the branches above, millennial lichens dangled in bizarre wefts, embellished by the silver berries of mistletoe, and embroidered a scented mantle mottled with all the most unthinkable nuances, from a dark green, grazing a pale brown and yellow, to a vague hint of azure. Through that surreal curtain, Loki’s eyes caressed Thor, he smiled again, while his gaze followed his gorgeous lover walking calmly towards the little stream and then sitting on the bank, vaguely in the need of a brief moment with himself.  
Lapsing completely to the reviving warmth he actually felt flowing through the enormous trunk, Loki simply enjoyed the sense of familiarity that place was getting across him, and in his mind he tried to find and clarify an image involving it from his forgotten past. Everything still sounded so incredible. He was so fascinated by the idea of that ancient Book of Oblivion that Heimdall mentioned, or of that Casket of Ancient Winters which Thor told him about. He wondered how it could be being a master of magic, able to force elements according to his will. He wondered what actually meant Thor when he talked of his Jotun form, of his being unique because two natures blended in him so preciously. He wondered about his own skin getting... blue, and colder, and smoother, and his own body delicately covered with... _amazing, lovely marks_ – those were Thor’s words precisely. Something Thor sure as Hel loved, for while he told him that his eyes were sparkling, and Loki giggled to himself, terribly intrigued at that idea.  
How pleasantly surprising when he realized that, no matter how deeply he was caught into his own thoughts, willing or not his eyes kept on falling on Thor, still nuzzled on the brook’s bank, and that just looking at him was enough to fill his soul with perfect wellness. He was consciously avoiding to think about Heimdall’s disquieting revelations, he could not do anything anyway, for the time being, except committing his entire self to his sweet god’s decisions. Which, he was sure, would have been the wisest. Oh, his sweet god.   
“My sweet god,” he whispered, unheard, for the simple delight of enjoying how suave it sounded.  
At that point, from the sack he brought along together with his bow and arrows, he picked out a notebook and focused on the first blank page of it.  
When after a while Thor came back, sat by his side, surrounding his shoulders with his arm, and stole him a fleeting kiss, Loki winced slightly.  
“What are you doing?” Thor asked, glancing at the notebook that now laid opened on Loki’s lap.  
Loki just smiled, and filling his eyes with his sweet god’s splendour he handed it out to him.  
“I told you I wanted to do that.”  
The last time he read Loki’s handwriting, Thor remembered even too well, and it still hurt. That atrocious night, when everything was lost, even his little one’s halting calligraphy on the last page of his journal seemed to force him to save no place for hope. How far it looked, that night. And how unreal. Now, the words stamped on that page without any faltering, even before being read talked Loki’s ultimate reliance. In his recaptured life, in their limitless future, in now and forever.  
Thor started reading in silence.

_“Sun.  
Powerful, bright, reassuring.  
The embrace a lost soul too long awaited. My soul. Your soul.  
Rain.  
Cosy, discreet, cuddling.  
The whisper of a heart too long alone. My heart. Your heart.  
Snow.  
Tender, intimate, alluring.  
The touch a bleary skin too long craved for. My skin. Your skin.  
You.  
The sun, the rain, the snow.  
You.  
The awakening of a body too long asleep. My body. Your body.  
You.  
Flawless reinvention, unaware in awareness.  
And beyond that, and beyond all.  
You.  
Me.  
Everything.”_

When they got back to the city, almost at twilight, Thor asked Loki to wait for him in their room while he’d go and pay Odin a visit. He perfectly caught how distressing it was to his little one even only to think of the All-Father, and he didn’t intend to cause him any anguish until that became strictly inescapable; besides, the mysterious schemes Odin was plotting, whatever they could be, were in the first place his own personal business, a business he was called to deal with one-to-one.  
He reached the entrance to Odin’s sleeping hall and, first unexpected thing, he found three of the Elders standing before the threshold as though they were guarding it. They raised a snooty look on him, almost indignant, they stiffened as he got closer like they were determined not to let him pass.  
“How gracious of you, prince Thor,” started the one in the middle, ostensibly sarcastic “to come and see your father, at last. Evidently, taking the architect of our disgrace back from the dead was more important.”  
Burning with sudden rage, Thor stuck his chest out, towering on him with his withering gaze.  
“I will not tolerate such arrogance” he retorted, implacable “from someone who’s meant to kneel before me.” Right away, he didn’t notice the shadow blurring the Elder’s eyes. “Move aside and let me in.”  
For an instant, the Elders seemed to make a stand, inducing Thor to toy with the idea of smashing them back to reason.  
“I said” he snarled “move aside.”  
There, though highly reluctantly, the three yielded to his threatening eyes and watched him entering without adding more words.  
As he was in, he startled, for the cold inside the hall was implausible, and the air all around smelled freakish. He recognized that smell. A smell of rotten soil, and mouldy bones, and fog. Freezing his nostrils with the loom of perdition. A smell that oozed vain whining in eternal hopelessness.  
He had no doubt.  
That was the same smell he sniffed in Hel.  
Cautious and nervous he approached the alcove where the All-Father laid, apparently sleeping. Sleeping. _“...this time... it is not just to replenish his health and powers.”_ No, it was not. Thor felt it, immediately. He studied him, he inspected any centimetre of his face, he frowned, perplexed, for he was looking at someone to him no more familiar. And not only because he could never forget, never forgive that Odin so lucidly plotted Loki’s death. _“This time... he did it following a devious purpose.”_ Unable to let the terrible suspect emerging in his mind take a clear form, he nonetheless read through those trembling wrinkles a sort of wilful frenzy going on, he saw the intrigues of magic stirring across that ancient body, while vague echoes of intrusive presences fluttered around, slipping away from his percipience. Feeling his own head all of a sudden heavier than a boulder from Nidavellir, he bowed it on his father’s face, exhaling.  
“When did it happen, father?” he whispered, caught in-between a faint sense of melancholy and the palpable awareness that in his heart all his filial piety had fatally gone dry. “When did I lose you?” He shook his head and there, by chance, he noticed a spidery breath of smoke rising from Odin’s forehead. He followed it with his eyes up to the ceiling, slowly. “But most of all...” His blood ran cold. “...when did you... lose yourself?”  
The foggy vortex whirling almost invisible, almost inaudible in the dim light over Odin’s bed stoked in Thor’s soul an uncontrollable mix of anguish, wrath, and dismay that made him move back from the bed, panting.  
 _“I know that in arranging this Odin is not alone.”_  
“What the...”  
A flash of black light.  
An instant of complete darkness.  
Dizziness.  
The entrance opening, his body being pulled out.  
The corridor floating in a mist that wasn’t there before.  
A place that wasn’t there before.  
A figure in the mist filling that place that wasn’t there before.  
No sign of the Elders.  
Just that figure. Tiny figure. Motionless, shifty. So tiny, in the mist. A child.  
Thor blinked, trying to put his thoughts together, trying to focus.  
“...who are you?...” he heard himself saying from another level of existence. “...what are you doing here?...”  
The child just raised on him his eyes, all black.  
A few seconds. But enough for Thor to see.  
Into those eyes, the abyss.  
Dizziness.  
An instant of complete darkness.  
A flash of black light.  
And back with the clearness, everything else. The three Elders, the corridor, the whole place he knew so well, intact and real. As if nothing just happened.  
No child around.  
Not a hint of his presence.  
Nothing.  
Thor shook his head violently, almost laughing at himself. A vision?, he thought. An hallucination, a trick of the mind? Well, given the hurricane of feelings he went through in the last weeks, no surprise if his mind had a brief rush of confusion.  
And he was sure it must really have been a sort of daydream when he saw the look on the face of the three Elders, showing no change at all. So, he let go. He knew he didn’t dream about Odin and the dark vortex, however. He didn’t dream about the ominous infection that he felt spreading insidiously, and only then he caught the shade of unnatural viciousness wrapping the Elders’ attitude. _“I know that in arranging this Odin is not alone.”_ No, clearly he was not, at many levels. He wondered how many of the highest citizens of Asgard were still supporting the All-Father even in his derangement, plainly sustained by some unfathomable magic. “The architect of our disgrace”, the Elder called Loki just a while before. How widely that web of schemes was still casting around Odin’s distorted hatred, how longer Loki and Thor himself should continue to feel threatened inside their own Realm?  
Thor suddenly felt the urge to get back to his little one, too long he had left him alone and unaware in that dim of bewitched snakes. And now he understood why it was crucial to hasten the recovering of his brother’s powers.  
The grin that twisted the mouth of the one who spoke before left no more room to hesitance.  
“Did you find what you were looking for, prince Thor?”  
With a growl of vexation, Thor grabbed his robe, brutally, lifting him from the floor. His words sounded as unyielding as only a fated Aesir king’s could be.  
“You are not strangers to me. I know your faces, I know your names, I know your houses. Pray that I will be in the mood for mercy, when the time comes.”

_“I am one, and I am many.  
I am the cursed raven coming to bring you oblivion.  
I am the misty horse riding waters and clouds.  
I am the immortal snake hissing your souls empty.  
I am the rabid wolf howling your hearts frozen in the night.  
I am the oncoming darkness...   
...and the dawn that splinters it.  
I am many, and I am one.”_

The terrible concern troubling Thor’s soul eased at once as he overstepped the threshold of their room and Loki, visibly impatient for his comeback, welcomed him with a translucent smile, that reassured Thor immediately. And seeing him wearing only a short towel around his hips sweetened Thor’s heart like a cascade of mead.   
“So?” Loki asked, coming closer to him, sincerely eager to know more. “How did it go with... the All-Father?”  
 _Let him out of our thoughts for a while more_ , Thor’s heart whispered. _Let me just look at you and... be in the heavens._  
“You have... wet hair,” said Thor, grazing a lock that fell on Loki’s cheek.  
“I took a bath,” Loki replied, blowing those words right on his mouth.  
Thor grabbed his chin, delicately, and smirked.  
“Oh, did you?” he jested, and with the tip of his index drew the smooth furrow in the middle of his chest. “Without me?” He giggled at Loki’s funny wince. “I think I need a bath too.”  
Loki brushed his lips with a soft kiss.  
“Go then, have it.” He motioned to the windowpane with a twinkly smile. “I’ll wait for you outside.”  
When Thor after a while stepped out on the terrace in all the magnificence of his nude body, he found Loki on a wide furry carpet that wasn’t there before, laying on his belly, languidly, and sipping mead from a mug while reading a book. Some little braziers were burning here and there, softly enlightening the night, and an invisible cloud of scented oils made the air around agreeably charming.  
Surprised, Thor nuzzled on the fur right at his side, his loin grazing the skin on Loki’s flank, his hand on his shoulders, gentle, there where the sinuous curve of his neck smoothened into spine.  
“What... did you...”  
Loki raised up a little on his elbow, turning his gaze on him, in a movement that made his long ebony hair tumble aside.   
“Do you like it?” he said sweetly. He poured some more mead and handed the mug out to him. “I thought... we could sleep here, tonight.” He caressed Thor’s thigh, chastely, and yet shivering with endearment at his sweet god’s little quiver. “I like the sound of the water.”  
Laying down next to him, Thor smiled, peacefully. He savoured his nectar and took a deep breath, unable to turn his gaze away from Loki’s face. Not that he recklessly forgot what his call was,  he never could, he never would; he simply sensed, he so clearly sensed that about that call he and his oblivious Loki just... _felt alike_. A tacit complicity was naturally inducing Loki – in the name of what they implicitly most cared about, and that went way beyond any menace Odin or whosoever could embody - to overlook as well a critical situation which, though not understanding, he was undoubtedly aware of. And that complicity, that _feeling alike_ tasted so _right_ that they became to Thor the most comforting, the most strengthening, the most vital proof everything he was doing, everything they were doing, and would decide to do, must also be unequivocally _right_.  
“It’s a wonderful idea,” he said, gloating, and blessed the heavens one more time for granting the two of them that extraordinary, unassailable parallel universe made of pure bliss.  
Almost unconsciously, his hand kept brushing Loki’s back, soft as a one-line poem whispered in the night; for a long while they just stayed locked into each other’s eyes, floating on the subtle sizzle of the braziers.  
“Won’t you tell me what happened?” Loki asked in the end, his fingers vaguely sketching the profile of the muscles on Thor’s chest.  
“Heimdall was right,” answered Thor, quietly, slightly shaking his head. “Something quite unexpected is going on. Odin is... moving things.” He knitted his brows. “And I am sure Hela is also behind that.”  
At those words, the look on Loki’s face let a sudden veil of concern out.  
“That’s because... you came to Hel... and took me, isn’t it?”  
Thor grabbed his neck, roughly, and stamped a kiss on his mouth before he could add more.  
“I’d do the same a million times again, little one,” His eyes spoke unearthly resolution. “Until the end of time and space. No matter what.” His smile allowed no doubt. “For the only thing I’m sure about, and I mean sure beyond any possible consequence, is that we are meant to make the future. Together.”  
Loki ran his fingers through his golden hair, tenderly, overwhelmed by that ultimate commitment.  
“And all this they are... moving... involves magic as well, right?”  
Pleasantly distracted by the freshness spreading from Loki’s pearly skin, Thor nodded, calmly.  
“Odin has always been the mightiest of all gods, he is the All-Father, and he’s got powers that none of us can match. That includes magic too. And now that he has gone... somehow out of his mind, he has become... dangerous.” His hand sweetened his grip on Loki’s nape. “But.” And his thumb rubbed the mother-pearl of his cheek. “As my strength can’t be equalled because I master the power of thunder, you, among all the sorcerers in Asgard, you are the most powerful.” He smiled at his brother’s little frown of uncertainty. “I know you can’t believe such a thing now, but trust me, you are. Even when the Jotuns took all your powers away, you nonetheless were able to overturn the flow of time. You are the only one who can fool Odin’s tricks, you did it already, and not just once.”  
Not entirely sure to be actually able – or even willing - to bear the weight of such a task, and almost intimidated at that idea, nevertheless Loki was starting to understand the crucial meaning of the All-Seer’s cryptic statements. And the crucial part he was predestined to have in the whole issue.  
“That’s why Heimdall told my perceiving ability must be enhanced...” he said, pensive, perfectly mindful of that mysterious _different help_ the Gate-Keeper mentioned and of Thor’s reaction at those words. “How can we do that?”  
Thor’s face didn’t reveal any sort of anxiety, just that endless, reassuring confidence that Loki was by then used to rely on.  
“Not the way he suggested, this little is certain.”  Thor’s hand never stopped brushing Loki’s flank while he was talking and now it was playing on the hem of the towel that still wrapped the preciousness of those loins. “At least, not until we’ve tried something else first.”  
“But... what did he mean... a _different help_?” Loki peered into Thor’s eyes. “You looked so worried about it... Is it something... risky?”  
Thor shook his head mildly.  
“Sort of.” And then he smiled again. “I don’t want to talk about that now.” Almost lost in thought, he loosened the towel and slipped it off, slowly, melting at Loki’s irrepressible shiver of rapture. “There are so many places I want to show you, and so many things about us I want to tell you.” Soft, his voice, as soft as his hand worshipping the smoothness of those glutes. “To help you find that sparkle in your forgotten memories.”  
Carefully, he draped himself on Loki’s back, running his hands along his stretched arms to reach his fingers and entwine his own together; he kissed his shoulder ardent, he blew his devotion on his neck, and warm and gentle leant between his nates.

 _The throne room looked different.  
Different, and somehow _not there _. The dark mist around was floating slightly, altering his perception. Changing the shape of things.  
_ Why am I here? _, he thought._ What is... here? _  
But it was there. It was there. The throne. The golden throne belonging to the mightiest rulers of Asgard since the beginning of time, and now vacant. Close to him walking forward, and yet far, getting lost in that mist. Getting blurred, fading.  
There, and not there. The throne.  
And on the seat, mist, thicker, and darker, clumping together in a new shape taking form.  
Instinctively, Thor moved his hand at his side to grab Mjolnir.  
He gasped, as he closed his fist.  
For what he grabbed was just thin air.  
_What sort of trick is this? _, he growled inside, for being arbitrarily deprived of his hammer was not something admissible in the known order of things.  
A shape, on the throne. Tiny. Motionless. A child.  
That child.  
“You again?” Thor’s voice echoed furious in the nothingness around. “Who are you?”  
As the child lifted his head and fixed his eyes on him, Thor’s legs became stiffer, and his feet heavier, and his steps harder. When he got almost unable to move any further, and dreadfully confused, the child raised his arm towards him, slowly, without the slightest wavering.  
And pointed his index to his heart.  
A flash of black light.  
An instant of complete darkness.  
Dizziness.  
Pulled back. Roughly._

And awake.  
Above his head, the sky.  
Still the dead of night, still their terrace, and the warm fur under his skin. Everything calm and cosy, the braziers almost extinguished, the familiar sound of the waters tempering the silence all around. Just that odd clump that for an instant, as he woke up, encumbered his chest like a stone and then vanished. An instant. That he forgot at once.  
Nuzzled at his side, Loki, breathing softly, sleeping. So peaceful.  
A damn dream, Thor thought, huffing. Just a damn dream. Of course, what else? A dream.  
And Loki. His Loki, his _real_ Loki.  
Thor yielded to a light smile of tenderness, while the echo of that dream splintered in a million weightless scraps as his eyes almost unconsciously leant on his little sleeping one. Loki was laying smoothly on his flank, a leg slightly flexed in a posing that sweetened even more the graceful curve of his hip; his cheek was leaning on his arm bent under his head, and his hair spreading on the palm of his hand.  
How many times already he got lost just consuming his eyes on that sight, Thor could not count; and yet he could never get sated, yet caressing Loki’s naked body with his gaze was as new, and as surprising, and as tempting as the first time it happened. Amazing, how that could be, how that kept being, and how that never was with anyone else in his past life; but no-one else, god, mortal, female, male, whatever, no-one had never been, could ever be what Loki was. The strength of the warrior blended in that body with the grace of the enchanter; Loki was god, magician, fighter, lover, enlightened, child, frost giant; he was as lethal as the darkest curse, he was as delicate as the frailest treasure. Such an unsanctioned fusion that since his childhood made him also a source of suspicions to every other Aesir; such an unusual mixture that through childish mockeries it threw him into his deadly solitude, and from there into his rage, and into his hatred, and into his... madness. Thor blessed the instant that let him _see_ the _real_ Loki and wrest him from perdition. “Such a precious creature”, Hela said of him down in Hel. Even the queen of doomed souls saw that. Yes. _Precious_. Thor felt that preciousness so deeply that it almost hurt. And he blamed all the Aesirs, and Odin first, because they couldn’t see but a monster there where instead there was a prodigy.   
Soft, his lips grazed Loki’s leg and drew a line of smooches all along it. He giggled at his brother’s slight trembling in the sleep, and he went on, kissing his waist, and arm, and chest, while little by little Loki mumbled into half-sleep, stretching mildly and smiling, his eyes still shut. Thor kissed his neck, his chin, his nose, and ended in his brother’s arms that moved slowly to cling around his shoulders, along with the cute little purr of fulfilment that Loki hummed blinking awake and seeing him.  
“How...” whispered Thor, running his fingers slowly on the profile of his limbs. “How can you be...” Their mouths were so close they breathed the same air. “...so ravishing?” Thor let him play, airily, with the gold of his hair, just getting lost into the sea of Loki’s ogling eyes. “Oh, little one... the things I’d do to you.”  
Loki giggled with smugness at his sweet god’s enraptured look, he wetted his lips with the hint of a kiss, blowing his perfect joy on the corners of his mouth. So instinctively erotic.  
“Is there...” Silk, his voice on Thor’s cheek. “...something...” Feathers, his fingers brushing Thor’s chest. “...that you dream to do to me...” And ambrosia, the immaculate lust in his eyes. “...but you still didn’t?”  
Vaguely embarrassed, Thor kept smirking at him, chuckling softly.  
“Hm-hm,” he nodded. The mere idea was enough to arouse him. “And it’s a bit... kinky.”  
“Oh,” Loki replied, hanging on his breath, cheeky. “I see.”  
They let the night whisper its secrets to their ears and rested, peaceful, for a long while. Thor didn’t tell Loki about what forced him awake, as Loki didn’t ask; they just stayed, weightless, lost in each other’s eyes.  
Until, while he was grazing Thor’s hair and as though for the first time ever he noticed that, Loki held the braid on his palm and looked at the black lock entwined in it, frowning.  
“This... this is my hair, isn’t it?” He smiled, surprised, for that image just popped up in his mind from nowhere. “I made it... didn’t I?”  
Thor grabbed his hand, shot through by a hit of eagerness.  
“Yes, little one, you did.” No matter if what Loki just remembered was still part of a dream, he felt sure it was vital, for that dream did actually come true. “You did, you did.” He chortled with satisfaction. “As soon as it gets light, I’ll take you there.”  
Loki opened his eyes wide on him.  
“Where?”  
“Your magic secret place.”  
Loki nestled closer in his arms, taking a deep sigh while blowing those words right on Thor’s tongue.  
“Oh... I’d rather find out more about those... kinky ideas of yours.”  
The unspoiled naturalness in Loki’s sensuality didn’t allow Thor to do anything else but close that charming mouth with a long, intense kiss.  
“We will have time for that, I promise,” he sniggered, on the flavour of that kiss. “Now there are more urgent things to deal with. We are the only ones who can grant Asgard and the Realms... a safe future.” _But still, we have the rest of this night here to consume_ , his eyes whispered to Loki’s while his voice talked. “And that means also granting the thing that I most care about. A safe future... for the two of us.”  
Laying his head on the warm marble of Thor’s arm, Loki rubbed his cheek on his bicep and cuddled up closer to him.  
“I already feel so safe…” His knee slipped between Thor’s thighs, candidly brushing his manhood stiff. “…here…”  
Thor clamped Loki’s leg in his.  
“I know,” He searched for his brother’s hand, he held it tight, he took it to his mouth, he kissed his palm. “But we need also to be allowed to live safely in a place that the fates sanctioned to be ours. And I don’t mean...”   
There, Loki leant his index straight on his lips, he smiled, and apposed his own mouth to his own finger.  
“Sush,” he purred. “Come what may. Just... let me be your everything. And you be mine.”

They loved, softly, in the last hours of the night that heralded the dawn and that lasted forever.  
And they didn’t notice.  
They simply didn’t.  
In the sky above, silently, more stars were fading out.


	7. Rage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Must the blade speak, and speak not blood and doom,  
>  While the dead stars rip the whole land apart.  
> Must the blade speak, before the last is thrown,  
> To let the chosen rise and the great havoc thwart.  
> Must the blade speak, to break the barrier down,  
> And to the One return what was thieved from his heart.”_
> 
> _::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::_

_“[...] When the blood is shed, the Unworthy becomes Worthy.  
Wax seven moons and seven moons wane,  
Waiting for the One who was born with his eyes open.  
Allies the Mightiest and the Darkest became;  
Amongst the gods walks the Unforeseen,  
And from the depths comes the bane,  
Before what had been scattered becomes a whole again.”_

Those were the last words Loki could read on the last written page of the Ancient Book of Oblivion. They decided to bring it along, as Heimdall suggested, when they left for the Sea of Fear the morning after, together with some other stuff whose purpose Thor didn’t explain.  
They rode calmly and almost in silence, exchanging intense glances and knowing smiles every now and then, mutually fortified by their mere closeness. Both nevertheless mindful of the strange events that morning coloured their awakening with.  
That morning.  
That morning, before they left, Heimdall asked to see them.  
And that same morning, as they finally stepped out from the palace, Loki rose a puzzled look up to the sky.  
“Don’t you think the daylight looks... darker than it should be?” he asked, vaguely worried. And actually, even if the sun was high already, an odd greyish blanket made the outside light sombre and burdened everything with a listless veil of dullness.  
“Indeed, little one,” Thor answered, pensive, rising his sight above as well. “Darker. And heavier.”  
Much more disturbing things grew when, trespassing the main portal of Asgard, Thor found _him_ there. Standing perfectly still right on the sideway. Waiting in the trembling mist his cloak was made of. Real. Real as Loki’s arm when he squeezed it at once making him stop, real as Mjolnir’s handle when he grabbed it instinctively.   
“Do you see him?” he whispered at his brother, keeping his eyes on the little figure that showed no sign of willing to make a single movement.  
Loki frowned, feeling a shiver running down his spine as he clearly caught Thor’s unease, yet not being able to see a possible source of it.  
“...who?”  
Thor gritted his teeth, and grumbled in his throat, for he could not give a name to the unnerving twist boiling inside his stomach. He just hinted at the little fellow, dithering on what to do next.  
“Him.”  
And – while a more and more worried Loki shook his head in jitters - as the child lifted his head, slowly, to stick his all-black eyes right into his own, Thor finally _saw_ , in the dull, real light of that altered morning.  
He saw his _real_ face.  
Of that he was quite sure, he saw his _real_ face.  
But he was not sure at all of what he saw.  
“...Thor?”, he heard Loki saying, he caught growing distress in his voice, he felt his hand grasping his arm convulsively. But nonetheless, he had to take some steps towards that creepy creature and, step after step, under those empty eyes, his anguish swelled together with a diffuse sense of confusion.  
All the nightmares, all the curses and all the deaths, all the masks of damnation and all the ghosts whirled on that face that was not a face, in the blink of an eye shifting into one another without pause and regaining in-between its improbable, soulless childish look.   
In a sudden rush Thor made as if to grab him, “What the Hel are you, what do you want from me?!”, he growled, but as he stretched his hand out the child just stretched his own in turn and touched him in the middle of his chest.  
An instant. An invisible strike, a blink of blackness, some fleecy words whispered in a thick fog, and the child _changed_ into _something else_. Before he could realize, it swiped through Thor’s clothes, then through his skin, then through his stern, piercing his heart itself with an unexpected pang that made him stumble and fall on the ground on his own knees.  
“Thor!” Loki uttered, dismayed, by instinct he sustained him, unable to believe his mighty god had just been struck down. He gasped in concern, helping Thor to stand up on his own legs again.  
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Thor hurried to reassure him, willingly neglecting the painful jab still crushing his chest. Just to be sure that nothing major happened, he took a quick look at his own skin under his clothing and sighed with relief, for not even the slightest sign was there. “He just caught me unprepared.” Flooded by Loki’s anguished eyes he stroked his cheek, he smiled. “I said it’s alright.” And kissed his lips, delicately.  
As he glanced up over his brother’s head, straight to the top of the main walls of Asgard, he saw the child again, standing on the highest border and looking down at them.  
Thor scowled at the small figure, never turning his eyes away from him, while he kept his arm tight around Loki’s shoulders.  
“But we definitely need to get your magic powers back.”

_He shuddered inside, mechanically.  
An involuntary reflex to the new gained strength forced into that shell now way too tight.  
All the demons he was screamed together in silence. Tamed at once.  
He had come halfway on the task he had been sent to accomplish, and from on high he watched them wandering away. He simply watched, not allowed to add to that mere act a thought, and not a feel, and not a breath. Not even allowed to actually see in the same way anyone else was used to.  
He watched them walking until they disappeared from his sight.  
He had to follow them.  
But first, in the distorted non-light of that morning that he himself provoked in order to move easily, he had to disencumber. And give a start to what was going to come after him.  
Out in the open of the awakening city, and despite that still undetected, he let his body change according to his needs. He inflated his chest, he tensed, he opened his mouth as though he were about to shout.  
He didn’t shout.  
He had to follow them.  
From the top of the main wall of Asgard, he spitted.  
The dark, dried corpse of which once was a star, the smallest one, the first he swallowed on his first night in Asgard, hit the ground far enough to lead people to think that was nothing more than an odd weather trick.   
He had to follow them.  
And in the meanwhile, there where the dead star fell, a black lightning ripped the skies and a crack cleaved the soil._

The late afternoon breeze caressed gentle their faces and a blurry sun seemed to hesitate to set under the horizon; some wolves somewhere started howling their ordeals in cuts and thrusts at the incoming twilight and a lone black crow, above their heads, aloft, flew his way to the mountains.  
“You didn’t tell me about those visions of yours,” went Loki at some point, his body following sinuously the pace of his horse. “About that... child-looking creature... that only you can see.”  
Thor shrugged, keeping his mount so close to his brother’s that their legs could skim each other.  
“I thought that was a dream.” Annoying, the general unease he started feeling right when the child raised his hellish eyes on him and not yet gone. “Apparently, I was wrong.”  
“Heimdall said someone was coming...” Loki said, pondering. “Maybe he is the one he was talking about.”  
Thor looked at him, he took a deep breath, he assented.  
“Possibly.” But still, he felt vaguely dubious. “There’s that child look, however, it’s... I don’t know, makes the whole thing sound kind of... unlikely.”  
At the same time, on the other hand, he knew there must be all the darkest wizardries involved and, actually, everything could ostensibly be. And Loki’s following words helped to lean towards that likelihood.  
“He also said he’s not what he looks like.”  
Staring at his face, grazed by the fading light that made it pearly, Thor nodded, halfway between being worried and enraptured.  
“I guess you’re right, little one, it must be him.” He shook his head, as to dissolve the fog keeping on clustering in his brain and preventing him from seeing the situation clearly. “It’s just... I’m feeling... weird.”  
Weird.  
As weird was that persistent burning sensation there where the child had touched him, although he had checked his own skin again and found nothing anomalous. Dark sons of Hel, magic tricks, Odin involved, Asgard at the crossroad between a mad almighty old king and a potential new one who at the moment was sailing across a sea of uncertainty...  
 _“How presumptuous of me hoping the All-Father could let go of his millennial delusion of omnipotence and accept the established facts as I forced him to see them.”_ The emphatic words Heimdall told them that morning suddenly came to Thor’s mind. _“Whatsoever is going to come from his obsession will not change the point: you are the one who is meant to take his place. It is already written. But it’s up to you, Thor, to decide to what extent you are ready to push yourself in order to save Asgard. I am sure you understand what I mean.”_  
Without any doubt he understood. And whatsoever would come, couldn’t be worse than what already happened. Worse than being forced to face his Loki’s death. Now they were side by side again, rejoined more than ever, and more than ever soon ready to fight. For once Loki had recovered his full abilities, nothing in the known worlds and further could have stopped them.  
 _It is already written._  
There, at once, overlooking his feelings, he smiled at Loki and strengthened his grip on his horse’s reins.  
“Well, we will see. Now, let’s hurry up, we’re almost there.”  
And they spurred their animals at full gallop.

 _“Are you still sleeping, All-Father?” said she. “While you are sleeping, they weave. While you are sleeping, your own, ungrateful son is plotting and menacing your authority. While you are sleeping, they put the foundations of your Realm itself at risk. Don’t be so sure you will have enough power to contain that.”  
“Are you trying my patience, you doomed creature?” he roared. “How do you dare to speak such words? Have you forgotten that you would not even exist if I did not allow you?”  
“How blind of you,” she grinned. “Your subjects and your warriors, great part of them at least, side with your son already. The same does your All-Seer, and many of your Elders. And all that you can do is spitting your threats against us?” Her grin grew into a laughter. “You will need us, instead, us, and our armies. So, be sure you’ll be awake, when their time comes.”   
She waited for his nodding, that came, rigid, after a while.  
“After you let him take his _beloved _trickster away from your Realm, my son is trying to restore his powers,” said he, caustically sarcastic. “If he succeeds, a new age of disgrace will fall upon us all.”  
“We didn’t _let _him, bleary-minded old ruler, he_ cheated _on us”, she growled. “And he will pay for that outrage!”  
“Oh, he will. They both will.” His voice, acrimonious, echoed in the ancestral void. “And that other renegade who calls himself the All-Seer, who tried to take advantage of a brief moment of darkness in my mind to induce me to think Loki was... _worthy _.” He sniggered. “Fools. I’ll make them taste the depth of their mistake.”  
“Let your son and his _beloved _trickster follow their purpose,” she parroted his sarcasm with no shame. “Just grant us the support of your mighty wizardries. We know how to take care of the thunderer.” Her hissing cut through the darkness around. “Oh, and don’t forget to look after what is left of your Realm and of your forces.”  
And then, before he could retort against her arrogance, she broke the link, to be left finally alone, unseen.  
And unsuspected._

Nothing was visible on the Sea of Fear when they arrived in the dusky dim that forewarned the night, except the silver of the water lapping the shore, and a low, milky mist caressing the sparse grass on the ground. Thor wasn’t surprised, and worried even less, for he remembered when he was there the time before. And he told Loki of all the marvels concealed inside that place now still invisible, he told him how it shone from the light of his creator’s soul, and how it changed on his feelings; he told him how he saw him making it snow blue in the sun, and how there time and space carried no meaning; he coloured his words with all the shades of wonder, to savour the awed look shimmering on Loki’s face while he was speaking.  
“Come,” he said, holding his hand and driving him on the exact point he remembered to lead to Loki’s secret shelter. With a big smile of confidence, he gently dragged his little one towards the water, foretasting his reaction at what was going to follow. As one, holding their breath, Loki’s eyes closed, they moved their feet beyond the shore...  
...and nothing happened.  
The sudden disappointment on Thor’s face looked almost hurting, while they both remained still, disheartened, dunked in the frozen water that skimmed their ankles as if to mock them.  
“I... I don’t understand,” muttered Thor. “Perhaps this is not the right spot, perhaps my memory is failing me.”  
“Or perhaps I am not ready yet,” Loki whispered, and smiled at him, tugging him back on the dry bank. “Perhaps I actually need that... _help_ Heimdall told you about.” He laid a sweet, knowing look on him, for the first time since he got back from Hel trying to be the one making the other feel reassured. “You brought along what is required, didn’t you?”  
Thor simply nodded, demoralized. And that odd feel of fatigue, that vexing sting he kept on glossing over, but that were there, undeniable, added weight to his discouragement.   
_It is already written._  
“Alright,” he went at last, finally cracking a smile while grazing Loki’s cheek with a soft stroke. “It will get cold tonight, if we are going to stay here longer than I presumed.” He got back to his horse, to unbind his sack tied to the saddle. “Let’s light some fire.”  
And so they did, and that made the night less dark, less burdened with dismal omens. The sea was an expanse of sparkling gems, in the pale moonlight trembling on their vague sense of precariousness, while the nocturnal creatures all around, unseen, slowly started their whining. From the tangle of the little wood nearby they heard a caw, they absently glanced at the big black crow flying down all alone and alighting discreet on a dry twig, not far from them. It shook its quills and then stayed there, quiet, like it was seeking company yet being too shy to dare a further approach.  
They just sat comfortably near the crackling fire, one between the other’s legs, Loki laying his back against Thor’s lap and Thor enclosing his brother’s waist with the gentle might of his arm. With the tip of his nose Thor brushed his temple, drowning in his scent, he made him turn his head a bit to stare at him and then to reach his lips, he lingered on them forever, for that probably was the last time he could have that pure, innocent Loki there with him.  
Both quite reluctantly restraining their untamed passion, they let go of that kiss, little by little, to try and focus on what seemed more convenient to do next. Enlivened by the soft breeze, improbable silhouettes of fire and embers danced their surreal suite, crooning mysterious riddles to the two silent gods; had they been able to understand that bizarre language, they could have played with them that grotesque game.  
Never slackening his hold around his brother’s body, Thor took a deep breath and grabbed his sack. He tugged it right in the middle between their touching legs and slowly opened it, under his little one’s attentive eyes. First he took out the old book, and then his journal, still locked but always brought along, and handed them to Loki, who leant them on the ground right at their side; at last, he picked out a small leather bag that he held, thoughtful, on his free palm before his brother’s face.   
“That’s it,” he murmured, and let his little one take the small bag in his hand.  
“That’s... it?” repeated Loki, not sure on what to think. That was such a little thing, and looked so... harmless. He shook his head, he smiled, confused. “How can this be... so...”  
“...dangerous?” Thor finished his sentence and, talking right on his cheek, he untied the sack to let him look inside. “These are your secret herbs.” Holding his brother’s hand with the bag on, he slid his fingers in to take a pinch of the dried mixture. “The magic herbs you happened to use... when your plain powers seemed not enough to you.”  
Loki frowned and bent his head a bit, to take a closer look at the quirky contents, and suddenly he wrinkled his nose in revulsion.  
“It smells... strong...”  
“I never tried them, but I saw... I saw what they can do. I saw it on you.” There, Thor’s voice got deeper than it already was, and a gloomy veil of gravity wrapped the words that followed. “You used to claim your herbs allow your eyes and mind to see beyond any border, in any dimension. And magnify your abilities beyond any possible imagination.” He leant an intense look on Loki’s intrigued face. “They do indeed, I saw they do. But along with that they also awake the darkest ghosts hidden into your soul, and once awaken, those ghosts are no longer under your control.”  
He paused, to be sure his little one could fully catch how seriously he was talking.  
“The last time it happened, way long ago already,” he resumed then “I had to watch you crying in pain, and screaming like thousands blades were tearing you apart, and begging for a help I couldn’t give you.”  
Shivering from the growing cold and from the disquiet those words provoked, Loki looked at the little sack with new concern, huddling up in his arms.  
“Now you... you are scaring me.”  
Thor rubbed his cheek on his hair, holding him tight.  
“At that time we were not yet... you know... lovers... but nonetheless, seeing you like that and not having any means to give you help was... devastating.” He took the bag from Loki’s hand and held it, glaring at it with rabid repugnance. “Thereafter, that day, when you finally regained mastery on your feelings and thoughts, I made you promise you’d never used these herbs of yours again.” The memory of that day caressed his soul with a feeble tinge of warmth. “And I’m so glad you kept that promise.” _Why must be my own self forced to break it, now?_ “Now, if I let you take them, I... I don’t know what they can wreak on you. You were not able to control the effect when you were fully powerful, now that you’re so... vulnerable... maybe they can drive you mad forever, or even... kill you.”  
Loki shook his head mildly.  
“But Heimdall said...”  
“I know what Heimdall said!” Thor burst out, unable to contain his anguish any longer, raising his voice at once and flinging the herbs bag away. Loki had a sudden startle, a disoriented look seized his little face in front of a reaction he’d never expected. All in one second, Thor thereon sighed, blaming his own coarse instinct, he frowned with regret, he took his brother’s head in his hands, gently. “Sorry, sorry, little one, I didn’t mean it.” He ran his fingers through his silky hair, softly. “I just wish there were another way.”  
Loki just nodded, wrapping him in the endless field of his eyes, and raised an airy smile. He stretched out one hand to reach and grab the book that laid in wait for their attention.  
“Maybe there is.”  
Perhaps that was just mere suggestion, but he was sure he felt the tome’s cover getting warmer and warmer under his fingers.

_“Must the blade speak, and speak not blood and doom,  
While the dead stars rip the whole land apart.  
Must the blade speak, before the last is thrown,  
To let the chosen rise and the great havoc thwart.  
Must the blade speak, to break the barrier down,  
And to the One return what was thieved from his heart.”_

“It ends here,” said Loki after he read those lines aloud. “I can see there must be words following, but they’re just shadows.” He paused for an instant. “ _Must the blade speak_...” He raised an eager look on his god’s face. “Tell me more about that... magic dagger.”  
The dagger had to be the crucial tile in that fanciful jigsaw, Thor was aware of that; he took it from his belt – where he had always kept it –, he leant it on Loki’s palms and told him everything. Under Loki’s awed eyes, and on Thor’s words, the peerless blade pulsed with feeble glaring, as though the closeness to the one on whose soul it had been forged awakened its hidden forces. A new turmoil of images, of undefined feelings grew inside Loki’s mind and heart, making his breath heavier; with the tips of his fingers he grazed the glowing blade, now perfectly smooth and with no sing of nicks.  
“You had to let me go...” he whispered, almost inaudible, his eyes ecstatically locked on the magic weapon. “...to have me back...”  
Thor grabbed his arms, forgetting the herbs, forgetting Heimdall’s advices, forgetting everything, just flooding him with a swamping look that needed no voice to talk. Confused, and almost panting, as though he followed what his subconscious told him, Loki then dropped the dagger on his own lap and picked Thor’s notebook up from the ground, holding it in his hands with a sort of new awareness. He had asked himself several times why Thor looked so caring about that obscure notebook, why he had always denied to tell him what its content was because “I want you to read it with your eyes when it will be”; and now, when that notebook came tamely open at his first try, as if it had been there for him to leaf through it since ever, they both held their breath for a long while, stunned, in silence.  
Before Thor’s captivated gaze, Loki glanced through the journal page by page, more and more shocked, his eyes filling with tears while he read on. And when he reached the last page he closed it carefully, devotedly, keeping it in his hands like the most sacred thing, his throat gone dry. Reading those words was like hearing Thor’s heart talking, it was like having an ultimate vision on the miracle that their belonging to each other was; it was like feeling all the feels just in one time, even if still not remembering the mere facts, and being struck by them as by a blow of light.  
One single, little flash, at last, made its own way through the boiling muddle of his reshuffling memories, and when he could see it, clear, he just raised a huge pair of eyes on Thor, forcing his trembling lips open and his voice out.  
“I heard you, Thor. That night.” His voice, broken from crying, and nonetheless stroking Thor’s heart like a panacea. “After I... after I died. I heard you. Calling my name.”

_From the bottomless chasms on the whole land the bowels of earth started throwing up.  
A thick, black sludge that had no shape slithered along the surface for a few meters, hissed ominously and rested, feebly pulsating.   
He was long gone after he vomited the last carrion of the last dead star out of his stomach.  
He had to follow them, and complete the task he was sent for.  
Stood the All-Father in his most secret chamber brandishing Gungnir, and summoned the ones still at his mercy and of his darkest sorceries; not long it took him to convince them that an already too far gone conspiracy headed his unworthy son to undermine his throne, turning upside down the millennial order of things; not long it took him to persuade them that for the highest good some external, peculiar help was strictly needed.  
In vane tried the All-Seer to send him the last vision on what he could let out from what he saw; more useful it turned out to gather all those ones who could plainly understand how deep and dangerous Odin’s blindness had grown. And keep them ready._

They jumped up on their feet in the glimmering night, Loki clasping the dagger in one hand and Thor’s fingers in the other, so thrilled they didn’t care at all of the few nightly beasts that came snooping around and that now leapt away in fright, nor of the lonely crow still there, fluttering its black wings tensely. Thor did not even mind but for one second that Mjolnir felt oddly heavier than it should be when he grabbed it up, too joyful he was that sparkle finally lighted up in Loki’s memories without any other need except his words.  
They ran to that same point along the shore, they dunked their feet in the water, and they were in.  
In.  
Loki froze at once, looking around, confused. On his face, his anticipation, his surprise and then his disappointment talked with no words, while his panting gradually quietened. How could it be? Thor told him of golden walls, and crystal stairs, and cascades of light, he described him that place as almost living. Whereas everything his eyes could reach was simply... grey. All the same, dreary, silent shade of grey, on the walls, on the roof and on the floor, changeless grey everywhere. And stillness. Like therein every single particle forming those walls, that roof, that floor – being made from such a unique material - had been put in deadlock, waiting for their builder’s soul to recover its wholeness.  
When he turned his questioning eyes on Thor, he saw the same perplexed look, a fleeting veil of bemusement and then, brightening up, a smile of retrieved confidence.  
“I think we just have to find your secret room inside here,” Thor went. “And then let this place do the rest, as Heimdall said.” He squeezed Loki’s hand in his. “Do you remember the way, little one?”  
Only then, under his sweet god’s eyes oozing conviction, Loki realized the link between that place and his own soul was real, whilst still so feeble that at first he had to focus on it with all his strength.  
“No...” he answered, softly. A link he felt growing more and more perceivable as he more and more confidently _listened_ to it. “But I think I can... feel it. I think it’s... calling me.”  
Headed by Loki’s inner voice they crawled into the improbable warren of that place. Step after step Thor couldn’t help but thinking they were leaving behind that matchless piece of their existence, that scrap now going to fade relentlessly into the greyness flowing in their back, that splinter of life all soaked with a pureness they had never experienced before and never would again. _Come what may, as you said, my little wise one_ , he told himself right then, following his eager Loki, _nothing will ever change what we are_ , he smiled silently, and almost without noticing they found themselves _there_.  
Loki stopped, panting, and Thor stopped thereby.  
In the dullness gravitating all over that concealed den, something was glaring, and palpitating, effusing a soft cloud of light whose nuances went through all the shades of green. Agape, Loki got lost staring at it at once, totally drawn, while the shimmering casket pulsated more and more brightening as he moved a few, trembling steps towards it. Loki could _feel_ it, even if not remembering, the changeling chest was _recognizing_ him. It was vibrating in tune, like it couldn’t wait any longer to finally re-open to his master its unique and long forgotten treasure.  
In the growing light that coloured and revived the grey around, Loki took the last step, holding the magic dagger tight in his right hand; the blade never stopped flaring shinier and shinier, irresistibly aiming to what it was meant to rejoin with. Loki’s breath hastened, _Thor, it’s trailing me in, I can’t control it_ , he coiled the hilt with both his hands and instinctively rose the dagger, _I can’t think, I can’t talk, I can’t see_ , slowly, mesmerized, over the dazzling chest. _I can’t turn around, Thor, are you still there?_ Oh, Thor was there, yes, right at his back, in silence, he felt him, sheeting him with the reassuring cloak of his presence, he felt him, ready to guide him if the need had occurred, while in a decisive rush he finally stuck the blade into the casket.  
The blast of light was blinding.  
And as it hit him through the blade, then through his arms and mouth, then all across his body making him shake frantically and flooding him like a storm, Loki’s scream was devastating. His eyes glimmered under the wave of all the powers, all the forms he had worn and all the sins, all the feats he achieved and all the lives he lived, that overwhelmed him all in one instant, knocking him out; hadn’t Thor been there to catch him in his arms he would have fallen on the ground, stunned.

_“Keep the passage open. Keep it open. Open.”  
“It will not last long. It is too well penned even for my might.”  
“We need it to stay open. To let them pass. To let them raise. To let us do what we must do.”  
“What you must do? I am wondering where all this confidence of yours comes from.”  
“Wonder whatever pleases you most. On this you must agree. We need your son out of the game.”_

_In the meanwhile, from the mud that the earth regurgitated all over the lands around the city of Asgard, something, shapes, still undefined, started taking form._

As fast as it blew up, the burst of light faded out and the casket vanished together with the dagger, leaving them in a silence now pregnant with a regenerating flux of life.  
“Loki?”  
The whole place around was now pure light, pulsating vivid, alive, quivering, while the last sparkle disappeared from Loki’s eyes as he opened them under Thor’s anxious face.  
Thor, calling his name, sweetly.  
“Loki...”  
First thing he did, as he could look at Thor with his newly replenished sight, he threw his arms around his neck, suffocating him in a long, desperate hug.  
“Oh, my sweetest one, my one and only! How could they even think that they could stop you?” he uttered on his hair, overpowered by that frenzy, by that turbulent stream of renewed vigour whirling under his skin. “Not even death can! And I am me, I am me again!” He laughed, he kissed him. “No, what am I saying, I am a better me!” Astride on Thor’s thighs he just couldn’t keep calm, he grabbed his head, he kissed him again, exultant, because for the first time in aeons he felt amazingly good, he felt invincible. “The whole me is back here, and the darkness is gone, and I’m so... oh, I am a god again. I am an enchanter again.” His lips leant a bead of light on Thor’s, he blew a musky veil of evanescent leaves on his nose, smiling, in bliss. “Your little god, your little enchanter.”  
Words erupted from his mouth like a river in spate, unstoppable, on the waterfall of offhand tricks he started throwing here and there before Thor’s pandering eyes, eagerly, more and more jubilant, more and more endearingly out of control. On his palm a golden rose took form and then changed into a million different flowers, then into gems, then into other shapes twirling implausible, while at his next gesture a rain of piebald drops fell from the invisible roof, and a sky of feathers opened over their heads, and a crystal mist sliding on the walls around started singing improbable tunes, in a prodigious and befuddling jumble, until Thor grasped his wrists, blocking him gently, amused.  
“Will you stop it already?” he giggled, delighted by that joy so radiantly gone wild, and stuck his eyes in Loki’s, soaking up his elation as lifeblood, while all the incantations splintered away into a soft, silvery dust.  
Loki just shook his head, still crazily euphoric, his voice coming out mixed with laughs and tears.  
“I know, I know, there is so much at stake. But... can you just... imagine?” He grabbed his hands, throbbing. “I have so many things to tell you, so many, oh, too many...” His eyes sparkled with unleashed emotion. “I remember, Thor, I remember everything.” Clasping his head, his thumbs pressed on his cheeks, he leant his forehead on his brother’s forehead. “I mean, I remember... not remembering, and being a white canvas yet to be painted on, I remember the _innocence_ , how it was like, how... sweet it tasted.” He rubbed himself on Thor’s legs, seductive, he stroked his hair, his face, his neck. “How sweet _you_ tasted, taking care of that innocence, and how you drew on that canvas that I was, little by little, giving life to a miracle after another, and after another... Oh, Thor...” He could not stop kissing and biting his brother’s lips, feverishly, he sighed on their groins brushing each other through the clothes, he chortled. “It was so... enlightening, so reviving, so unconditionally fulfilling... So simply... flawless.” Thor’s hand reached his skin under his vest and Loki shivered, he smiled again, again he kissed him. “Like rediscovering everything between you and me, and adding perfection to perfection.” On his fervent enthusiasm, on Thor’s speechless rapture in front of the new wonder that once again gave him his Loki back, time begged to be frozen anew to let them fly, just for a while, a while, a short, unending while. “And now we will carry all this with us forever. I am sure this was written in the fates, together with my death. Makes me thanks the fates that wanted me dead.” At once, as if that memory all of a sudden stood out among the others, he pointed his index right at Thor’s smile, flaunting his most adorable sassy face ever. “Oh, and you never told me before about those... kinky itches of yours.” He giggled at Thor’s wink, letting his own jolly exuberance overwhelm his sweet god with no restraint. “As you want me I want you, now, I want you to take me, I want you till the end of the universes, I...”  
There, tangled up in that compulsive eagerness, Thor grabbed his brother’s nape and closed his lips with the deepest, the slowest kiss he could fill that alluring mouth with. He savoured the replenished wholeness of his Loki, whose hands slipped skilful under his clothes to feel the might of his bare shoulders, both unable to tame their mutual arousal, both craving for nothing else but getting lost in a renewed hurricane of passion.  
It was then that Loki felt it.  
When his greedy fingers slowly slid down on Thor’s chest.  
He delicately came off from that kiss, his face clouded at once, his euphoria forced to extinguish into a thick halo of apprehension. He peered into Thor’s eyes, that he caught unaware, and vaguely surprised. He grazed his cheek.   
“Are you... feeling alright, my sweetest?”  
Thor winced, taken aback.  
“What do you mean, little one?”   
“I mean that I also remember... her.”  
Thor frowned.  
“Hela?”  
Loki nodded. His voice now sounded nervous.  
“I can... _feel_ her. The child I could not see is _her_ child. One from her offspring. Being there in Hel at her mercy created some sort of link, so now I can feel her. And I know she is plotting something.” He blinked, focusing on his perceptive abilities, for so long dormant and now shouting out to be unchained. “And I can feel _him_ too. The All-Father is being blinder than ever.”  
Humming in distress, Thor inhaled deeply, assenting, again trying not to pay more attention than he felt necessary to the scattered numbness floating more and more notable across his limbs.  
“By the way, I am alright, yes, I am just...”  
But Loki’s hands were already unlacing the vest on Thor’s bosom, carefully, to uncover his skin and lean on it a pair of disconcerted eyes. Addled by the sudden anxiety he saw replacing the excitement on Loki’s face, Thor looked at his own skin in turn, confused, unable to understand.  
“What?”  
Silence.  
Loki’s voice died in his throat, a long, creepy quiver shot him all across his spine, for there where Thor could not see anything, not being gifted with the means of sorcery, he instead could.  
He could.  
And he saw.  
His blood ran cold.  
Marring the perfection of Thor’s chest, right in the middle, there where Thor’s heart pulsed in its unconscious pureness, a wound.  
A deep, terrible wound.  
Loki’s lips trembled, while he hesitantly apposed the tips of his fingers to the border of that wound, not daring to touch it.  
It was not an usual wound. Not from an usual source. No blood was dripping from that wound, but a feeble trickle of light poured out slowly and faintly, nevertheless unceasing. The same light that flared inside Thor’s soul, the same light that sparkled in his eyes, the same light that generated the power of thunder.   
Now being stolen from him, drop after drop.  
Anguished, while his breathing grew into panting, with the palm of his hand Loki shrouded that wound, trying to push his sensitivity more deeply, trying to search for a possible way to stop that dreadful plunder, and finding none. He put his mouth close to the wound, lightly, he breathed from it and blew on it to make at least less painful what he knew his sweet god must be enduring, even if not showing it. Thor just felt his lips grazing his skin, and then saw his sight rising directly into his own.  
“She... she is doing this to you...” muttered Loki, on the quizzical look that showed up on Thor’s face. “I can’t... I can’t stop her from here, and she is trying to take advantage, while we are here...” He looked around, agitated. “She’s got Odin’s help and she’s trying to use the passageway...”  
“Loki, what are you talking ab-...”  
But Loki leapt up at once grabbing Thor’s arm with both his hands and almost pulled him up by force.  
“We must get out of here, quickly!”

They were out, and he was there.  
Instants.  
They froze right on the shore, Mjolnir getting heavier and heavier in Thor’s hand and Loki staring at the child standing still a few meters from them. He could see him. Now he could see him. And as soon as he could see him, he understood. On the forearm of the child, stayed the crow. That same, black crow that followed them on their way from Asgard, that same crow looking so harmless when it flew down there near their bonfire. He saw, and he saw the child could see he saw, even if not supposed to. He caught in him something next to surprise.  
No.  
Too fast.  
Everything, too fast.  
He needed time to readjust, he needed time to get used to his retrieved plenitude, he needed time with Thor. His Thor. He needed his eyes looking at him with renewed desire, he needed his hands running along his body with fervent impatience, he needed to get lost in his arms to find himself, to find themselves again building a new stupefying maze of lust. He needed time to feel him melting under his skin, and completely merging his soul with his own one. He needed time just to rest on his lap and loosely flow on the wholeness of being one again, complete again, together.  
He needed time for his love.  
But there was no time. No time. Behind their backs, from the dark waters up towards the darker sky, a whirling vortex, black as the depths of doom. The same vortex Thor saw in Odin’s sleeping chamber, and now opening there only thanks to the passageway that laid concealed in Loki’s secret place. No time. No time to think, no time to talk, not even time to take a single step forwards or backwards. In the right moment Loki stretched his hand out to unleash his powers, in the right moment Thor tried to raise Mjolnir against him, the child let the crow free. Loki managed to pick a few stones from the ground, he blew some magic words on them, he threw them rabidly and when they fell they grew into a circle of splinters around the child, trapping him in. But what only in seeming was a bird had already... _changed_. Its murky wings, gigantic, flapped rumbling over their disoriented eyes, triggering a swirling wind that quaked the whole land, raising the dust, the stones, the bushes, the trees. The hellish creature that was now a flying monster, huger than them both together, at once towered them, aiming at them. Aiming at Thor.  
“Beware!”, Loki shouted, too late.  
The magic darts he threw could not break the invisible shroud that must protect the creature, nor could the hidden forces of the woods and of the rocks that he evoked. That had to come from Odin’s sorcery, Hela was not that powerful, not to embody such a serious challenger to his _whole_ self. Nearby, an astounded, shocked Thor couldn’t find in his muscles strength enough to swing his hammer before the enormous claws stuck into his shoulders, into his living flesh, rending from him an excruciating shout. Loki shouted in turn, he gasped, he hobbled in the whirling dust that filled his mouth, that filled his eyes, while the horrific bird lifted off carrying its priceless quarry; he saw Mjolnir dropping down from Thor’s grasp, again he cried out, “Father of all the dooms! Let him go, or I swear you!”, he desperately tried to grab Thor’s hand before the feathered beast lifted him too high, his throat bursting in throes, “I swear you! I will rip your heart out from your breast with my bare hands!”, but nothing he could do, “And I will swallow it!”, nothing, but throwing up his rage, hallucinated, while the vortex devoured raptor and prey and sealed up on them in a few moments, inexorable.  
It took him several seconds to tame at least his wheezing and regain a vague sense of reality after the vortex vanished. But he did not intend to tame his wrath.  
The wind calmed down, the emerald of his eyes sparkled fierce while he turned them around and locked them on the changeling figure still trapped inside the magic circle. Nothing seemed to affect that vicious entity, nothing let catch in him any sort of emotion, except that twisted look of astonishment in front of someone who should not be aware of his existence.  
“Who.”  
The voice from Hela’s child was many voices. And it came out like someone else pushed it out from another dimension.  
“Are.”  
Deep, hoarse, unreal. Unnatural.  
“You.”  
Loki stepped towards him, slowly, his lungs still hurting, his throat still burning, his chest still throbbing violently from the ceaseless sobbing. Pain. Despondency. Rage.  
Rage.  
Never in his whole life he felt his rage burning so wild, and nonetheless so lucidly righteous.  
He inhaled all the air his breast could house, before he snarled his next words grinding his teeth.  
“Who am I?!”   
His first strike crumbled the stone circle to pieces.  
“I am one, and I am many.”  
He sniggered at the creature. Once freed, the child stopped being a child and from his eyes, from his mouth, from his hands he released all the demons he was, becoming every nightmare in everyone’s worst sleep.  
But Loki grinned again, gulping down his own tears, foretasting the bloodshed about to come.  
And then stepped forward.  
“I am the cursed raven coming to bring you oblivion.”  
A blast of cracking energy hurled from his hand and struck implacable, one time, and then a second, and a third, thoroughly ruthless, intently lethal.  
“I am the misty horse riding waters and clouds.”  
The devilish things grew feral, they growled, they spewed, they ripped the air with their claws, they slithered foaming to reach and coil his legs.   
But yet, Loki stepped forward. And his voice echoed in the starless night.  
“I am the immortal snake hissing your souls empty.”  
From his eyes, glaring more dazzling than a hundred suns, swirls of green light streaked in an unsparing row into the monsters’ jaws, and heads, and shanks, and hearts, and bowels, forestalling each one of them, from all sides, indomitable. And arms, paws, limbs, tentacles were ashes, and nothing could the rotten clots, the poisoned flames, the fetid scorching breaths they tried to spit on him.  
Loki stepped forward, all his body exuding the vivid light of his power, stoked by a fury that was not meant to die down.  
“I am the rabid wolf howling your hearts frozen in the night.”  
He howled, and his howl bashed the few demons still standing, that vomited a gush of black fire before letting out a deadly rattle; they staggered an instant, they morphed back together in an amorphous bulk and then they remained still. Frosted to death.  
“I am the oncoming darkness...” Standing a few meters far, Loki just raised his hand and clenched his fist, fiercely, before that ghoulish statue of ice. Shattering it into flakes. “...and the dawn that splinters it.”  
He didn’t even give a second look at what was left of Hela’s offspring, forgetting it as soon as he restarted listening to his own heart.  
The silence wailed on his tears, and only then his wrath slowly faded into desolation.  
When his eyes looked around and fell on Mjolnir.  
Mjolnir.  
Laying lifeless, abandoned, lost in that lost land after losing its master.  
He dragged himself there, wasted, extinguished.  
“I am many, and I am one.”  
 _And despite what I am, I couldn’t save you._  
Emptied. Again.  
 _I couldn’t save you._  
His fingers trembled skimming the hammer’s handle.  
He crumpled on his knees in front of Mjolnir, sobbing convulsively.  
And contemplating the endless joy they just re-conquered crushing into despair.  
“...I am Loki. _His_ Loki.”


	8. Worthy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Being worthy is not a matter of fates.”

Ache.  
The plumbean void around crumbled into the ache of those pangs tearing him apart, while he couldn’t stop grazing Mjolnir’s handle. The lucidity his newly regained condition of entirety brought along made the situation even too clear and hopeless to his eyes. Everything was in fact amplified, and flowing untidily like a river in spate under his skin; amplified were all his strength, all his memories, all his reborn powers burning indomitable to be released, amplified was the awareness of the looming threat, that he felt as dangerous as nothing had ever been. And amplified was the sudden sea of solitude suffocating him more and more racking as he realized he was unable to move an inch away from the inanimate icon of their bane.  
Solitude.  
Immense, unreal.  
He just cursed his own self, and fates, and deities, for he could not believe after all they went through there could still be something capable to prevent them from achieving what was their right to achieve.  
Now more than ever the words Thor wrote to him during those distant days, the words that since those days were fixed indelible in his mind, sounded inescapable.  
 _“We spent millennia fighting, together, against each other, and killing enemies, and leading wars for other people’s sake. Now I only wish we both could live just on our love. I know he wishes the same. Is that too a petty thing to ask, for two like us who were born gods?” **(1)**_  
The cold nightly wind hissed as he tried to focus and push his magic sight deep through the invisible rift between the worlds, between realities, searching for him. He plumbed the entire Hel in all its recesses, he sounded out every darkest alcove inside the dusky dimensions he guessed Thor could be abducted to, he penetrated deeper and deeper into unsuspected places that even the sneakiest entities hardly dared to enter, seeking for a whisper, for a glimpse, for just the slightest echo of Thor’s heart.  
But he found nothing.  
Nothing.  
He screamed rabidly at stifling night, dejected. How could it be that he was not able to catch a single hint Thor was alive? How? And could have Odin really pushed his craziness that beyond any line? That terrifying idea took a more and more clear form in Loki’s mind, gradually wiping everything else out. Had all that happened before he lost his powers, and life, and memories, he could have managed it, no doubt, he could have managed it. But at the moment, at the mercy of the bursting mess of overpowering feelings his recomposed soul was... Gods could kill gods, no-one knew that better than him, and a mad Odin, desperately trying to keep control on what the fates already stated not to belong to him anymore, was indeed the most powerful, the most dangerous and relentless god in all creation.   
So, that was the only question left to shout in Loki’s head.  
Was Thor still alive, was he? In full mastery of his own self, Loki had always been able to _feel_ him, wherever Thor might happen to be, no matter how far. Even from his foggy _Elsewhere_ , the farthest of all places, even from there. And now, now he was not. What else could that imply, besides that Thor was dead, what? The anguish grew unbearable in his heart together with his wheezy breathing, his devastating upheaval in front of a condition he’d never expected, never pondered, not even ever thought as merely conceivable.  
 _...dead?_  
His sweet Thor, his refund ark of plenitude, his magnificent god of endless pleasure, his king, his lover, his life...?   
He ground his teeth, panting.  
No way, he shouted to himself, no way.  
The Ancient Book of Oblivion spoke words of unquestionable truth.  
 _“...To let the chosen rise and the great havoc thwart.”_  
No way that Thor could be... dead.   
Why the excruciating clamp of loss was devouring his soul then, why? Why his magic sight failed him?  
“Where did they take you, my sweetest?” he whispered to the lifeless hammer lying before his knees. “What did they do to you?” He sobbed, without rising his sight, for he didn’t need to look up to the sky to know that it was empty. “Are you still out there, somewhere? Are you?”  
He waited in the vitreous silence, hanging over an answer that did not come.  
“...Thor?”  
He gasped, while his eyes, still locked on Mjolnir, filled with new tears.  
“Now I know what you must have endured when I was dead.” He shook his head, slightly. “Now I know.” And as he felt his rage bursting again, he glanced up to the endless void and again screamed. “Is this a further punishment?! Is this the final price we have to pay for having been so... _ungodly_... to make our love our first priority?!”  
All of a sudden, on the echo of his shout, a muffled sound, as of withered leaves trodden by a cat’s feet, came to his ears and doused his voice in his throat.  
And only then, he noticed.  
A thick, black rain had started falling from the moonless sky, since when he couldn’t tell; hushed and discreet but relentlessly unceasing, it curiously dissolved an instant before touching the ground. Distracted from his thoughts and from his anguish, Loki frowned, halfway between being puzzled and intrigued. Even in the unearthly darkness that wrapped the place around, he could see how the trees, and the bushes, and the grass, even the sand and stones, everything blackened at once as the livid drops skimmed them and vanished. Everything, but the small circle around himself and Mjolnir, somehow immune to that bizarre phenomenon. As he broadened his view, he realized the improbable rain was falling everywhere, as far as his eyes could see, beyond the line where the sea faded into the horizon, beyond the mountains’ profile, beyond the woods, perhaps even beyond the borders of the realms. He didn’t stand up, for he could not leave Mjolnir alone, he just stretched his arm out and called the arcane book that still laid where they lit up the bonfire, and that suddenly flew right in his hand at his command.  
As he opened it to see what new was written, he felt the cold running across his limbs and to the marrow.

_“Together they merged their unspeakable sins, there the havoc begins.  
Together they merged their unspeakable sins, there the havoc begins.  
Together they merged their unspeakable sins, there the havoc begins.”_

And on, and on, and on. Just that one new sentence was there, repeating endlessly, page after page, until it faded into the unfathomable blank.  
Whose sins was the book talking about? His and Thor’s? Did they actually commit some sort of sin, then, some sort of unspeakable sin? Did they?  
“I remembered you wiser than that, Loki,” burst the voice in, abruptly, right on his troubled thoughts. “It is time you regain mastery on your replenished self.”  
“Heimdall?!” uttered Loki, startling at the sight of the Gate-Keeper standing there before him. He didn’t feel him coming. “What... what are you doing here?”  
“You seem to need some incentive.”  
Loki turned a scornful gaze on him, almost annoyed.  
“Do I?”  
Heimdall ignored that rush of haughtiness.  
“I cannot stay long,” he went on. “The situation in Asgard requires my presence. And _yours_.” He fixed his enigmatic eyes from above on Loki’s face. “And by _yours_ I mean yours and Thor’s.”  
A sudden hit of wishful eagerness passed through Loki’s soul, wiping his conceit out and making him gasp a smile of rediscovered hope.  
“So he is alive, then?”  
“Of course he is alive. Weakened to the end of his tether, but alive.”  
“And how is that I can’t feel him? Nor see him? I tried everywhere my sight could penet-...”  
“Because you are looking the wrong way.” Heimdall peered at the quizzical and nearly embarrassed look showing up at once in Loki’s eyes. “There are some forgotten places hiding between the worlds, you should know that. Places created in order to be removed even from a god’s memory, places simply laying there, where nothing ever happens, where no-one ever walks, where even death forgets to enter. They imprisoned him into one of those places, hoping – and quite rightfully, it seems – it would not have occurred to you to search there.”  
The silence that followed wrapped Loki’s heart in a blanket of retrieved resolution, while the eyes of his mind were starting to see limpidly beyond the words his ears just heard and, little by little, a now aware lucidity took the place of rage and dismay.   
“I am a fool,” he admitted, shaking his head. “I guess I’d better... Oh, whatever. I have to hurry. He needs me.”  
“And the Realm,” Heimdall added severely. “This dark rain falling here and everywhere else is an expanded consequence of what is going on in Asgard.” On his face, a true, utmost concern. “With Odin’s forces and sorceries at her side and thanks to the passageway you hid in this place, Hela could release her armies all across the land; now her darkest warriors are preparing to fight side by side with the All-Father’s against the loyal Asgardians who still care for the future of their homeland. Death is about to spread around like a plague, together with abjection and damnation.” He fell silent for an instant, pondering the gravity of his words. “It has been aeons since the last time the Asgardians fought against each others.” He paused again, on Loki’s heavy breathing. “It is not yet too late to stop all this, but it will be, if they succeed in drying out Thor’s strength. So yes, you have to hurry indeed.”  
He kept his eyes on Loki, still on his knees near Mjolnir.  
“He will need his hammer.”  
Loki touched Mjolnir’s handle, pensive.  
“I know.” He sighed. “But how am I supposed to bring it to him, huh?” The sad smile on his mouth talked all his distrust. “I doubt that fates had finally stepped beyond what I used to be and consider me enough worthy.”  
Heimdall’s voice got harsher, as though the last thing he’d expected to hear were such words.  
“Being worthy _is not_ a matter of fates. It surprises me how you still are so little confident in your own self, but I will ascribe that to the hard path you had to walk in your last times.” Cutting as a blade, his gaze penetrated Loki’s. “Did you try to lift it since you sit here, or did you just waste your time complaining?”  
Stabbed right in his pride, Loki trembled, awkward, confused. _You’re right, All-Seer_ , he thought. _It hurts my soul to admit it, but you’re right_.  
“No, I... I...”  
“Then try.”  
Loki rose his sight at him, then pointing one feet he stood up on his knee and coiled the hammer’s handle with his fingers, thoughtfully, slowly, still slightly sceptic. All the times he tried that came to his mind at once, all the times he tried that... and all the times he failed. He inhaled deeply, not yet ready to dare, he quivered, he felt the handle almost pulsating in his fist to get accustomed; he winced, for he clearly sensed it was Mjolnir itself trying to convince him that he could make it and, straight through Mjolnir and from wherever he might be, that it was Thor. He strengthened his grip, more and more confident, his heart hastening its beating while a wave of pure energy began vibrating across his hand, and wrist, and arm, softly at first, then stronger and stronger. At last, he clamped his eyelids, he gave the final pull and stood up, putting in that single movement all the vigour he could. And then stayed there, disoriented, for that sacred symbol of worthiness he knew to be the heaviest of all things just came up light as a whisper, tamely, at his first try.  
He glanced at it, astonished, and then he glanced at Heimdall, and then at it again, holding it in front of his eyes, speechless, incredulous. He smiled, he gasped, while a lump throttled his throat and unmeant tears filled his eyes, perfectly conscious he’d never been able to put into words the feelings whirling in his soul at that right moment.  
Because what just happened meant more than anything else could ever happen. Because Mjolnir could not lie, and Mjolnir was Thor, and now it was him too. Because that was the final seal to his new life, and to the unearthly sacredness of their choice, of their fated belonging to each other, of their ultimate right of ultimate sharing.  
Mjolnir.  
In his hand.  
That would mean also... Oh, by all the gods, how transparent were getting all the tiles in his mind, one after the other, giving form to a picture until then obscure.  
The warm wave spreading from the hammer all across his quivering body left him with no more doubts, he smiled again, zealous, and forced his broken voice out.  
“Now... now I can feel him.” That was Thor’s heart palpitating in him, that was the strength of his pureness blasting into his soul, so unexpected, so wildly enlightening that it made him sway. “I mean, not just... feel him... like I used to feel him until now, now he... oh, he is...” He laughed on his own tears letting that overwhelming tide flow uncontrolled, and hadn’t Heimdall been there he’d surely experienced a brand new kind of arousal. “He is... he is all over me.”  
Heimdall just nodded, adumbrating a smile of understanding, for he could clearly read between the lines.  
“Looks like you are ready, now,” he simply stated. “Remember who you are in first place, Loki. Because it is also time to make the most of your... peculiar nature.” He waited for his assent, before adding more words. “Find him, before anything else. Then I suggest you pay Asgard a visit, for you will not be able to free him, until you see with your own eyes the real source of what is trapping him.”   
And as quietly as he showed up, he disappeared through the black rain dropping thicker and thicker, while a primeval silence fell back to cover all the possible ordeals about to come.  
Alone again, Loki took a deep breath and closed his eyes, standing still on the shore, Mjolnir held out in his fist.  
 _Oh, yes_ , he said to himself and to the rest of the universes. _I am ready. I am ready as I had never been before_.  
Without moving an inch from where he stood, he focused on his trans-location power and pushed himself across those lost dimensions he used to know quite well in his past life, when he was always on the lookout for hiding places; he had forgotten how bizarre they could look, however, and how spooky to the eyes of those not accustomed to deal with the supernatural. But he was. The many features that merged in his essence, some still awakening, some already unleashed, were whirling inside him in a clutter of voices rustling and giggling and whispering to him a thousand ways to take revenge for everything. And together with that, the vivid savour of the experienced innocence had now built a little nest inside his soul, combining with the rest, tempering all the ardour into a main desire of simply getting back safe, to simply lay, and sleep, and dream clutched in Thor’s arms.  
He walked unseen among the mummified echoes haunting those places, he followed the only track that could be sensed inside that cosmic void, and that grew clearer and clearer, a brook of light flowing in the eternal nothingness, as he wormed his way into the deepest. The track of Thor’s marred soul, feeble, but limpid, and still desperately trying to fight – as Loki could perceive – the overpowering forces slyly draining its splendour.  
His real body still frozen on the livid shore, in his palpable projection he crossed woods where only dead trees grew, he forded rivers of petrified screams flowing in mid-air, he entered caves dug into hills of bones, he jumped across the farthest moons lost beyond any memory, after that track now seeping directly under his skin. As he got closer to his destination he started sensing _her_ looming too; he snarled inside, quivering in anger, for even if he made sure that she could not be aware of his presence, he nonetheless felt her more and more strongly permeating the whole vibe around.   
He finally ended in a dusky cleft, so dark, so well concealed into that most concealed dimension that at first even his magic sight could discern nothing but a dense cloak. He stopped, panting before the ossified walls he began to perceive weighing around like an engulfing eddy bound in eternal stillness; before his eyes could see, his heart caught him at once, and almost broke. The whole place oozed Thor’s torment, Loki could feel his shame, his broken pride, his rage. And he could feel his pain. His atrocious, lacerating pain. He gasped on the dim just slightly clearing, because for an instant he was afraid he wouldn’t make it to overcome that pain.  
And then he saw him, and his breath stopped, along with time and space and with the destiny of that side of the creation. For even if he did not yet know that fully consciously, nevertheless there, in the right moment he saw him, his inmost self sanctioned the shape of the oncoming future.  
Even from the bottom of that well of void, even in its deafening silence Thor’s whole body was shouting out his agony. No sort of chain or rope was visible, but still his arms were stretched wide and his wrists blocked in an unseeable vise, his nerves, and muscles, and veins pulsating from the intolerable tension. His head bent over his bosom looked almost lifeless, the golden streams of his hair tumbled forward hiding his face, in such a painful way that Loki thought he was unconscious. Blood from the cuts that ripped up his bare skin everywhere, like after having been weakened he had been tortured, blood from the terrible slashes left on his shoulders by the claws of the devilish bird that had abducted him. But more terrifying was the wound, that now rent him from his chest down to his stomach, larger, and deeper, and vomiting that precious light that once out flew a short stretch in the air and then was sucked into the invisible.  
At the same time, Loki could clearly see _where_ it was sucked, he could see _from where_ the main power controlling all that came; he could see floating confused in the dusk the dark slaves of Hela, put there to guard and torment the priceless prisoner; he seethed with the hunger of hurling at them all and reduce them to ashes, but all that he could do was throwing himself on Thor, to wrap him with the shroud of his incorporeal body in a transient cloud of relief.  
As in the thick fog blurring his mind he realized it was him there in his abyss, Thor lifted his head with a last ditch effort, and his mouth trembled, and his eyes blinked all bleary, shouting his chagrin louder than his pain, in a wave of endless abasement that tore Loki’s soul asunder.    
A puff of light, Loki’s fingers grazing his lips, while on Thor’s strain to speak he swallowed the tears and forced on his own face the fondest smile.   
“No, shush, my sweetest, please, do not say anything.” He smelled his distress together with his blood, he leant his palms on his bosom, careful, disheartened. “For only you can see me, no-one else can, and she must not find out.” He gasped at Thor’s desperate glance at his own chest, where the wound must excruciate him more than the goriest hell. “Oh, Thor, I swear you.” He breathed right on his mouth, hoping that Thor could feel him to the fullest, even if only through his mere projection. “Because they did this to you, they will pay a price they cannot even begin to imagine.” With an ethereal kiss he brushed his cheek, his only wish being to remain there, to assuage his suffering, to keep him swaddled in his vaporous embrace, to let him know that as Thor had always been there for him with his own life, now he was there for Thor. “I wish I could stop your pain and free you now, but something else must be done before I can...” He waited, anxiously, until he saw a sparkle of reliance in Thor’s eyes. “Try to withstand just a while longer, I’ll be back soon, in flesh and blood...” He whispered the last words with his own heart directly, sinking in the blue of Thor’s beclouding gaze. “...and I’ll be back bringing Mjolnir to you.”

***

Asgard was swamped with a lugubrious dimness when, after his first flight with Mjolnir all alone, he alighted on the edge of the highest tower of the city and took a wide look all around.  
The landscape looked eerily surreal, and a surge of distress captured his soul at once adding to the discomfort that didn’t abandon him since he saw his sweetest one being so mortified. He had no time to waste after the scenery, Thor was consuming his last strength waiting for him, nonetheless he could not help but freezing for an instant at that terrifying view. After most of the stars had been swallowed, now even the sun, however surviving, did not seem strong enough to overcome the darkness and, along with that, the doom; from the gashes on the ground and across the whole plain, muddled creatures dragged along towards the outermost walls of the city, growling, disorderly, floating in and out from the black fog that followed their heavy march and blackened everything it touched, everywhere.  
 _“...you will not be able to free him, until you see with your own eyes the real source of what is trapping him.”_  
The sudden echo of Heimdall’s words deflected his attention from the hellish view and he focused at once on that source, that he felt springing from there, exactly as Heimdall said, from the very core of Asgard.  
Before he moved a single step his magic sight saw something that made him burst with renewed rage, with a devastating wish of ending everything there, in that right moment, once and for all. He rushed down across the city, wrapped in his invisible cloak, heedless of the bustle seething along the dusky streets; he reached the palace, he sneaked shiftily down and down along the corridors and the stairs, in the tangled crawl ways that led to the underground; he made himself visible again only when he was into the deepest bowels of the mansion. Into the Casket Room.  
And there he stopped, overwhelmed by a wave of sullenness.  
The Casket of Ancient Winters.  
Open, and its lethal energy flowing out under Odin’s control, floating in a stream that changed from a deep blue into a dazzling white up to the invisible ceiling and vanishing into the same, dark vortex that swallowed Thor away a few hours before.  
In the blink of an eye Loki understood.  
That was how they could force his secret passageway to stay open, and let Hela’s armies pass through. That was how they could maul Thor’s heart with that uncanny wound and then abduct him, lock him into that forgotten nook and now be sucking his living force away. Using a source of power whose primeval conception, and forging, and destination had been conceived not for the Asgardians, but for the icy race which Loki himself came from. That made it the only means Odin could use to hinder Loki’s powers, but at the same time, despite that the All-Father could seize and control it thanks to his immense might, that made it also a deadly double-cut weapon.  
Loki blinked in the dim, sensing the ancestral call of his old bloodline.  
 _The dumbest of all choices, All-Father_ , he chuckled inside.  
He stepped ahead, cautiously and still unperceived, for Odin was too busy keeping all the forces he was moving under management. Loki strengthened his grip around the hammer’s handle, he felt the numinous chest vibrating violently, clearly responding to his presence there.  
He took a deep breath and measured the tone of his voice.  
“Move aside from the Casket.”  
Oh, the look of endless astonishment and vexation on Odin’s face when he glanced up and realized Loki was there, standing fierce in the green halo of his power. There, catching him by surprise. There. Brandishing Mjolnir. That look, that speechless look talking more meaningful than any word. That sparkle of wounded hubris flaming that single eye. So enjoyable, so gratifying that Loki could hardly hold back a laughter of pure delight.   
“Are words failing you, All-Father?” he said with a sarcastic smile. “How is it that you don’t call me unworthy, now?”  
On Odin’s silence, his eyes glimmered with ultimate resolution.  
“I said. Move aside.”  
There, with a roar that made the entire room shake, Odin turned Gungnir against him.  
“Did I just hear you daring to give me an order, you degenerate crossbreed?!” On his face, a mask of sick compulsion. “I am Odin All-Father, I am the one who decides to create worlds and to destroy them, I am the one who was before you all could be, the one who allows you all to be! You do not...” His titanic chest inflated so vehemently that one would have deemed to see his heart exploding. “...give me orders!”  
Words that in another life Loki heard several times severely shouted to the Realm from the mouth of the undisputed, rightful king of all the gods, sounded now as pathetic as the delirium of an old lunatic. While his thoughts ran incessant, Loki played upon that delirium, stretched his free hand out and released a burst of energy directly into the Casket, that interrupted its flux and closed at once; he shouted furiously on the All-Father’s growl and, before the blast cracking from Odin’s spear could hit him, he raised Mjolnir, he gasped, he gritted his teeth, still asking himself if that was really possible...    
...and Mjolnir answered.  
The clash between the simultaneous strikes was rampageous, they both were thrown to the ground, Odin by the hammer’s blow, Loki by the ricochet; but the first to stand back on his feet was Loki, and he could double himself into a dozen clones that surrounded the Casket at once. The growl Odin let out at that sight probably resounded across all the Nine Realms.   
“You are a fool!” roared the All-Father, mockingly sneering. “You are a fool if you believe this will be enough to attain a victory you can only have in your twisted dreams! You have no idea of what has already been moved!”  
Loki waited for him to get up, holding him at the hammer’s point, smugly. He simply felt invincible. He gloated inside, tasting for the first time such a bracing sensation.  
“Oh, I have, instead.” He grinned. “I just have no time to deal with that now. But I will.”  
If hatred and contempt could be a blade, they would have made an axe drawn from Odin’s eye.  
“You filthy creature!” His rattle hissed throughout his ground teeth. “The worst mistake in my entire life!” His hoary hair, his beard, his bloodshot eye, his wrinkled face, freaked out by the frenzy and by the strain to steer the Casket, the violent breaths quaking his massive body, everything – at Loki’s eyes - combined to bring about through that old god the allegory of the annihilation of an era. “Whatsoever you think you may contrive, it will end in fire! You will end in fire!” He rabidly whirled Gungnir against the clones, that simply dissolved in part to absorb the blow and then recomposed back. “Because I’d rather see Asgard swallowed by the Eternal Darkness, never to raise again, than being infected by the poisoning plague of your being its ruler!”  
Loki stood there watching, unperturbed, for he was far beyond already.  
“When I think of you as of my _professed father_ , it looks to me like I’m thinking of a life I never lived.” He smiled. “I can’t allow you to take away from me the only thing that makes that life real... and worthwhile.”  
Maybe, if Odin hadn’t got tarnished with that heinous guilt toward the blood of his blood, maybe Loki would have granted him a last grain of aloof commiseration. But not by then. By then, he had nothing left to feel about that pitiful carrion of decay, except a boundless rancour. And disgust.   
“I will not kill you now only because you’re still _his_ father.” He didn’t lower Mjolnir, not for a single instant. “But I hope he will never forgive you for what you did to him.” As not for a single instant he lowered his eyes. “So that I will not have any more scruples.” 

He perfectly knew it would not have taken long to Odin to get rid of his clones guarding the Casket; but he was sure they’d resisted long enough for his needs to be satisfied. Moreover, the little gift he left well hidden into the chest itself would have turned out very interesting for the All-Father.  
He filled his lungs with the scent of the night, tempered by what survived of daylight into an aberrant everlasting twilight. He didn’t waste any time pondering on how things in Asgard could have gotten to that point, so fast and so deviously, nor on whose fault; feeling he was acting fairly was enough to him, and the easy way he could overpower Odin – at least in that first confrontation – was quite a blatant proof. Mjolnir’s handle was warming up his palm, without pause nurturing the one and only aim burning his thirsty heart.    
 _Just a while longer, my sweetest_. The wind ruffled his hair, and the suffocated light enhanced the alabaster of his face. _Just a while longer_.  
Now, Hela’s turn.  
Because it was deeply into Hel that Thor’s bright strength was being sucked, and into Hel laid the fatal connection that needed to be broken. Sparkling as a dawn in Alfheim, every single piece combined in Loki’s mind, sealing the final pattern of the whole picture.   
That would have been even easier. And way more fun.  
 _“...For it is also time to make the most of your... peculiar nature.”_  
Yes.  
His... _peculiar nature_.  
Loki sneered to himself, foretasting the perfection of his plan.  
Oh, the seduction of trickery, so long forgotten and now shouting its lure from the inmost nook of his soul. Now about to be set to serve the most crucial of all purposes in his entire life.  
His teleporting power, together with the acquaintance developed by his stay in that Realm, brought him right before the gates of Hel in less than a few seconds. Garm just grumbled at his sight, lifting the enormous snout to sniff at him, but Loki sent him to sleep with a mere gesture of his hand. The stinging cold that made his body chill despite the long black coat he was wearing tasted almost inviting, while he rose his sight up to the Hellgate’s top, lost and invisible in the frozen fog.  
He felt _her_ there, even if still unseen, he felt her impending, and inspecting, and wondering on his presence at the entrance of her Realm, a presence that she clearly didn’t expect.  
He could have forced the gates open at once with the most trivial of the spells. But he decided otherwise.  
He stood haughty, his hand held Mjolnir in plain sight right against his own chest, and giving the most cunning of his smiles he spoke loud, without the slightest hesitance.  
“I salute you, Queen of the Doomed.”  
And there his scheme was triggered.  
The iced air trembled around him almost alive, leaving him with no doubt that she was listening.  
“Darkness used to be my perfect soul mate, and now it is so nice to savour its fragrance again.” While he was speaking, through his most hidden sight he ensured she was not yet aware of his latest meeting with the All-Father. “Our history goes back several ages, Hela, as I’m sure you remember.” He listened to the silence, that he felt vibrating ghoulishly. “And I am no more the wretched empty shell you lately took care of in your blackest corner here, surely you can feel that. As surely as you must feel there is a new and unique bond now between us.”  
There she revealed herself on the other side of the gates, a grimace of perplexity mixed with mistrust and curiosity seizing her creepy face, for Mjolnir had immediately caught all her morbid attention.  
“Silver-tongued creature,” she hissed, and grinned, towering him while her skeletal fingers slid between the gate’s bars to reach and skim the hammer. “You carry a vessel of great power... that even having lost its master... yet is not supposed to be in your hands.”  
Loki nodded with a satisfied smirk, fixing the allusive green of his eyes in the black void of hers.  
“Yes. Such a great conquer. I’ll let you guess by yourself what this implies.” He heard her sizzling smarmily, he sniggered with collusion, pre-empting her incoming question. “Oh, yes, I know what you’re thinking. Thor.” The look on his face was so smugly taunting. “Me, and Thor, and everything that goes with it. Believe me, I have no doubts that _he loves_ me. In a way no-one else will ever be able to match. And I will not insult your intelligence claiming that I didn’t enjoy that. He is such a sweet dreamer.” He sighed with dullness, deeply, he shrugged. “But, you know, I haven’t been myself for a long time. Now I am, and I’m starting to see again what priorities are. And love... love is such a mundane, overrated feeling.” His voice got more serious on the lines that followed. “I am a natural-born loner, and I definitely deal better with things when I am on my own.”   
He fell silent and chuckled, staring back at her inquiring eyes plainly trying to verify if he was actually speaking the truth.  
“Oh,” he continued then, forestalling any possible reaction from her. “I just had a quick look at what you are unleashing across Asgard, I must admit, that’s quite impressive.” He moved closer to her, winking ambiguously. “But as you might know, I prefer to act behind the scenes.”  
She tilted her head a bit on her scraggy neck, in a sharp twitch that on any other living being would have seemed somehow artificial. Her greedy eyes kept falling back on Mjolnir, fatally, not even trying to conceal her urge.  
“What is your point, son of Jotunheim?”  
The coils of her hair, lengthening spooky, moved sinuously forward to weave around Loki’s throat, letting her growing annoyance out; he simply grabbed the sneaking locks with his free hand, unabashed, and pulled them back with the most relaxed nonchalance.  
“My point...” He shook his head, a vague but calibrated condescending air to colour his next words with the seeds of innuendo. “Are you sure a disgraced, crazy old god actually makes the right ally for you?”  
She frowned with sudden nervousness and baulked at a qualm that evidently didn’t occur to her until that very moment. On her disquieted wavering, Loki sniggered with connivance, knowing he had her on a string.  
“Well, I see now you see what my point is.”  
The grin on her twofold-featured face let her torn interest transpire, while her wide mantle of shadows spread out all around, clouding the entrance in a whispering fog.  
“It sounds like you already have a well devised strategy in your mind, trickster.”  
Loki winked at her.  
“Oh, you bet I have, my lady. That’s why I’m here.”  
And she winked back, or at least that was her most likely intention, for what her half-skull face showed up looked more like a grotesque mask of whimsicality.  
“We are listening.”  
Loki snickered, shaking his head and looking directly into her eyes.  
“Oh, no. Not a chance that we talk here.” He grasped one of the bewitched bars of the Hellgate, pushing his own face through the gap in-between, an impudent smile on his lips. “We don’t want that my _well devised strategies_ wind up within the wrong earshot, do we? Let me in, and you’ll be glad to hear what I have in store for you.”

***

The warmth and the soft light he evoked inside the room were the cosiest welcome as they got back. Carefully, Loki eased his unconscious Thor on the large bed, taking a final breath of relief, for there, at last, nobody could have found them. That was their room in Asgard, although it wasn’t: after his secret shelter had been violated, Loki managed to shift its entrance a bit across the elsewhere that laid between realities, to make it impenetrable again. And now they were inside the part of it that touched Asgard and their private residence, but that at the same time wasn’t in the real Asgard; he thought that would have made to Thor the most comfortable place to recover and, moreover, from there, once ready, it would have taken them no more than a few seconds to be on the real battlefield.  
Availing himself of the plenty of unique features his magic lair provided, Loki had arranged everything to make his sweet god’s healing as fast and easy as possible; nuzzled on his knees right at his side on the bed, he stared at that magnificent body, still laying inert and bleeding from the ‘ordinary’ wounds still open. Every atom of that room perspired magic, the walls, the furniture, the braziers spreading enchanted balms, the air itself, as every atom of that room perspired Loki’s inmost essence; and what only apparently looked like their customary bed was actually quite another thing. Its base sank into the bowels of creation, down to the roots of Yggdrasil, and its mattress was cushioned with the Tree’s lifeblood; the sheets were fabric woven with the most enlivening tresses that he could catch from an aurora’s hair, and in the pillow he put drops of star amber together with the echo of their sighs from the first night they loved.   
He smiled with tender confidence seeing Thor’s minor injuries starting to heal at once, when he added his dainty touch to the whole magic and to his brother’s body’s own healing faculties; only the deep slashes on Thor’s shoulders, coming from the infected claws of a doomed creature, kept pulsating and burning the cherished flesh. So he blew into them whispers and words, _I know how much they hurt you_ , he ran his fingers through Thor’s golden hair, softly, _but it won’t last much longer_.  
The jumble of emotions whirling inside his soul made his heart jump from the excitement for being rejoined again to the dejection in seeing Thor so weakened, to the thirst of revenge and to the overwhelming urge to shower that body with a boundless blanket made of kisses.  
He leant his cheek on Thor’s chest, delicately, there where until a while before the dreadful wound mauled him; he closed his eyes at the familiar warmth penetrating his skin and at the little, instinctive quiver he felt passing through Thor’s limbs right at that contact. He rested there, just that, for a long while. He needed it so much. Just that. His skin. His scent. His breath. His heart. His Thor. _His home_. Almost intangible then, little by little, he started blowing on the smooth furrow running between the marble of Thor’s pectorals at first one, and then two, and then a cloud of soft smooches, and he didn’t stop, till he heard his brother’s throat grumbling and felt his hand moving to reach and stroke his hair.  
Loki raised his head at once, he smiled on the blurred confusion in Thor’s blinking eyes, he grazed his lips with his own putting in that single kiss all the sweetness the relief of seeing his treasured one awakening aroused in him.  
Thor blinked anew on Loki’s eager smile, then turned his sight around, disoriented, and then again on Loki.  
“Wh-what...” he muttered, all his exhaustion oozing from that single word. “...wh-where...”  
Keeping his hands on his neck, with the tip of his thumbs Loki brushed his stubble, filling his eyes with him.  
“Safe and already recovering, my handsome.”  
Thor gasped, as if that thought came to his mind all of a sudden, he tried to lift the boulder of his head to look at his own chest.  
“Is... is it still there?” He couldn’t make it, his head fell back on the pillow, he panted. “Th-the wound?”  
“No. No, my sweetest, it is not.” Feathery as a wadding pad, Loki laid his palm on Thor’s palpitating stomach, exuding a little halo of light to instil into him his magic warmness. “I managed to contain Odin’s madness, for the time being.”  
He gulped down tears of contentment when Thor’s hand reached his one and his fingers wove together with his own in a compulsive grip, while their eyes locked into one another’s. The chaos of things he would have wished to tell him mixed all up in a whirling jumble, and all that he could do was taking the cup he had prepared on the small table nearby and putting it in Thor’s hand, thoughtfully.  
“Here,” he whispered, with his own hand guiding the cup to his brother’s mouth. “Drink slowly. It’s quite a powerful blend.” He kept his keen eyes on him, basking in bliss while he watched him sipping the enchanted elixir. “Yggdrasil dew to melt the Tree’s own resin together with some beads from Mímisbrunnr... and a touch of my own expertise.”  
After he drank Thor took a deep breath, trying not to bother about the terrible pangs lacerating his shoulders, although he was starting to feel somehow relaxed, and cracked a pale smile. But still, discouragement prevailed in his strained gaze, as in his voice, when it came out again trembling with apprehension.  
“...Hela?”  
There, Loki smirked at him, unable to restrain a grin of smugness.  
“Oh, she’s going to fall in love with the fake you I left there for her.” He giggled. “I made him very submissive.”  
And mixing strokes, and smiles, and thrilled words, he told him everything, while drawing on his skin mysterious doodles of light. He told him how when he got back to him he found him lifeless, and how, having broken the flux sent from the Casket, he could finally force resealed the wound sucking his life away; he told him how, with perfect timing and with a couple of his most clever spells, he freed him from the bewitched shackles, replacing him with a replica while wrapping him in his invisible cloak; he told him how he secured Mjolnir’s handle in his fist with his own hand, so that he could absorb energy enough to let both fly away to safeness, together and unseen. And he told him how perilously Odin in first place was behind all that machination.  
“I saw perdition in his dried heart,” he murmured at the end, shaking his head lightly. “And I don’t think he has any intention to retrace his steps.”  
At that point Thor had a burst of rage, but a grimace of pain showed up on his face and he growled rabidly, for his weakness didn’t allow him to even lift his shoulders from the mattress.  
“Hold back your anger, my sweetest,” Loki said softly, grabbing his arms with sedulous resolution. “Save it for the time it will come useful.” He blew new enchanted words on the deep gushes still carving both Thor’s shoulders, trying to assuage a little more the throes he knew they were torturing his sweet god with. “Now you must have some rest, and let me look after you.”  
The reviving sensation coming from Loki’s breath, his endless tenderness coloured with the shades of lust, his smiles, his touch, his eyes flooding devotion and desire together induced Thor’s rage to subside, leaving place to a diffuse look of desolation when he again tried to raise his body and again he didn’t make it.  
“I can’t... I couldn’t...” he sighed, his voice almost broken. “They made fool of me... they overcame me... so easily... and Mjolnir... Mjolnir dropped from my grip...” He turned his eyes aside, as if he wanted to hide the tears his wounded pride forced to well up. “I feel... ashamed.”  
Loki jumped up on his knees, grasping his hands, determined.  
“But you must not!” he said, holding those hands tight against his own chest. “Please, Thor, please. Don’t do this to you.” He fixed his gaze on Thor’s face, forcing him to turn his head and look at him. “Thor.” At the feverish, almost elated confidence burning his renewed soul. “It’s not your fault, it was a most powerful combination of major occult forces, you couldn’t do anything!”  
He fell silent for a short while, lost in his brother’s eyes, he waited until he saw them yielding a bit to his effulgent fervency.  
“Believe me. You couldn’t do anything.”  
He drove Thor’s hands on his own hips, slowly, and bent over him to graze his lips with the hint of a kiss, that gradually grew more and more intense, more and more sensual, more and more greedy. And when he raised his head again he smiled, sassy, and laid on Thor’s face a sultry wink.  
“That’s why you have me by your side.”  
He ordered to the soft light around to shine blue and green only, and to the air to exude pearls of tranquillity.    
“I know how to help you regaining your strength, I already took care of everything.” He outlined Thor’s brawn with the tip of his index, airily enticing, spreading enchantment and lure on that hankered skin. “It will not take long, I promise.” He blew grace on his nipples, he foretold elation to his tummy. “Because I am my own master again, you see...” He whispered again through the slashes on Thor’s shoulders, inhaling the bane, dissolving it. “...and this means that when it comes to deal with the occult...” His lips ended on Thor’s neck, and then cheek, and then mouth. “...I am the best.”  
“Then come here, you little wizard.” Unable to resist, Thor grabbed Loki’s shoulders and pulled him down next to himself, surrounding his waist with his arms to hold him tight against his own flank. He chuckled right on his mouth. “If I keep you this close, I’m sure I’ll recover even faster.”  
“Oh, you better do, my sweetest.” Breathing each other’s breath they could not help but letting their lips satiate at least the surface of their thirst. “For I can’t wait to have my god back strong as he should be.”   
Carefully, for he knew Thor was still suffering even if he didn’t let it out, Loki rubbed his body against his brother’s, while the soft robe he was still wearing became more and more uncomfortable. Thor filled his nostrils with that compelling, piebald sensuality only his little one’s fully recovered self was able to emanate. That was the first relaxed, intimate instant they could enjoy after Loki had regained his inner wholeness, and it was flawlessly appeasing. On the delightful numbness that now soaked his limbs, Thor ran his fingers along Loki’s arm, slowly, to reach and take his hand, to hold it in his own and stare at it, somehow enraptured, brushing his palm with his thumb.  
“So you can lift Mjolnir, now.”  
Their heads were close as one on the same pillow, their eyes deeply enchained, when that remark at last came breaking the silence.  
“So it seems.” Loki blinked, vaguely worried, for he saw him so pensive. “Does this trouble you?”  
His gaze never turning away from his brother’s, Thor put Loki’s hand close to his own lips and skimmed that palm with a mushy kiss.  
“No,” he just whispered, and smiled, and let his smile say everything else in his place.  
They fell silent again, listening to the cluster of unspoken words that rained on their hearts beating in unison. Back. Back, and whole again, after such a long time they had almost forgotten how it tasted. Back, more replenished than ever. More together than ever. How nourishing, Loki thought, finally embracing his glorious god in unblemished consciousness. How warming and reassuring, thought Thor, seeing in Loki’s eyes, sparkling intact, that arcane, multifaceted wisdom, in front of which he always used to feel charmingly floored.  
“How... how far has it gone, then?” he asked softly after aeons, when he felt ready to ask and bear the answer. “I mean...”  
“...in Asgard.” Loki finished the sentence, clung to his eyes, in perfect symbiosis. “Too far, I’m afraid.” The mystical fragrances permeating the air and melting with the scent coming from Thor’s skin were so distracting. “When you’ll see with your eyes, you’ll understand.”  
Thor mumbled, holding a twinge back, and tried to make himself more comfortable on the mattress, while he kept brushing Loki’s arm, languidly.  
“I look forward to that fight,” Loki went on, his mouth grazing Thor’s stubble. “For I can’t even think of what they did. To you, to us. To everything.” While he was speaking, his fingers smoothed the braid plaiting Thor’s hair and his, with a fondness whose ethereal levity dispelled the heaviness of his assertion. “But it will be a tough one, this time.”  
In Thor’s gaze, a desolated awareness.  
“I know.”  
No more words were needed lest they understood each other.  
And no more stifling thinking, Loki decided, as long as they were suspended into that magic bubble of splendid isolation. So, he flooded his sweet god with the most tantalizing of all smiles, fiddling with the ripped hem of his pants, and wiped the outside present time out.  
“Oh, but it will end, my sweetest.” He filled the few millimetres of concern still separating their mouths with a whiff of gauzy cheerfulness. “It will end. And when it ends, I swear you, I won’t spend any more time, any more strength, any more trick in doing anything else... but laying in our bed, with you, until we’ll have extinguished the very last drop of our energy.”  
Thor laid on him a knowing smirk, hung on the closeness of his lips.  
“Mmm. Sounds tempting.”  
“Well, I must admit...” The luscious shades tingeing Loki’s voice made that closeness more alluring than the contact itself. “I can’t stop thinking about those... _perverse_ thoughts... you have on me. I have mine too on you, you know... But I’m more interested in yours, and I’m trying to figure out what they can be... They involve my ability to shapeshift, don’t they? Because, you know, I can turn myself into whatever... intrigues you most... you just name it, and I...”  
Breaking that ardent stream of words, Thor grabbed his nape, delicately, he smiled in relish, sinking in his eyes.  
“No.” How affably resolute he sounded, while his hand heated Loki’s skin through the clothes. “Since that day in the Whispering Wood, I’m in love with _this_ body, and I’m in love with _this_ face.” He unlaced his vest, carefully, he slipped it off, he stared at the reviving prodigy that body was with the same, ecstatic amazement of the first time he did it. “That’s what intrigues me.” The tips of his fingers worshipped the chiselled temple of that chest. “I don’t want to have anything different before my eyes.” The delicacy of those tiny nipples, the dainty temper of that tummy, the vaporous mystery of that navel. “I don’t want to have anything different under my touch.”  
The tiny tears welling up in Loki’s eyes were the most meaningful answer to those words. He moved his face closer to Thor’s, so that their foreheads could graze, both shivering in crave, both drowning in the mixed scent of their skin. With a little grunt of pain Thor turned on his flank, to let his own belly brush Loki’s while breathing, and his own legs entwine together with his brother’s.  
“And I had not even time to tell you...” he whispered on his cheek “...how happy I am to have you back in your amazing plenitude.”  
“Oh, Thor,” muttered Loki, all dreamy, slightly tensing in Thor’s embrace. “I’m trying to find a way to put into words how incredibly I am feeling... I am myself again, but more than that now I have in me also the everything I savoured, the everything you gifted me with while I was emptied...”  
He gasped softly and quivered in rapture when he felt Thor’s manhood hardening lustful against his tummy, and his own sex replying at once to that yearned call. He sighed, he blinked, he smiled again.  
“You’d really...” While his mind spoke, his tongue just plunged into Thor’s mouth. “...better rest...” And got lost, interlacing with Thor’s a million tricks. “...my sweetest.”  
Thor let his lips go just for an instant.  
And simply pressed his sex more assertively on the niche of his womb.  
“Yes, little one.” He smiled. “I know.”

\------------------------------------

_**1\. See[“Until that Night”, Chapter 5, “Into the dark”](http://archiveofourown.org/works/609847/chapters/1348333)** _


	9. The voice of the rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a time to take action and fight, and there is a time to sit, restful, and think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took me a lot of work, more than any other. But at last, I managed it. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for waiting all these months for this update.  
> The poem I quote in this chapter is “The voice of the rain” by Walt Whitman (from “Leaves of Grass”).

_Far ahead in time, among the futures.  
Among the countless possible futures.  
Or in the only one meant to be.  
His eyes closed, his body abandoned on the pallet inside the little haven he had arranged in the heart of the forest, under the farthest offshoots of the Tree’s roots, he listened to the wind.  
He listened to the wind, and he listened to the rain._

“And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower.”

_The scent of the rain.  
The voice of the rain, the crooning of the rain.  
The soft pattering on the leaves, on the grass, on the makeshift canopy sheltering the perfection of his lyric solitude.  
Cosy. Calming. Reviving.  
Familiar, to him, the only one who knew how to listen to the secret language of the elements. And how to speak to them.  
Sometimes, he felt the urge of simply sinking in nature all alone, no thinking, no worrying, no restrain, just letting his soul flow random and free. To breathe with the trees, to sip from the stones, to see through the brooks. To feel the earth vibrating immense across his body, sharing with him the hugeness of its life force. And to delicately add some of his own to the changeling painting of primeval creation._

“Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:  
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,  
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,  
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed, and  
yet the same…”

_Floating over the lines of that poem that suddenly came to his mind, he smiled at the glaring certainty that, still intact even after the many centuries gone by, filled his whole soul with that immutable, divine wellness.  
So many battles fought, so many worlds risen and fallen, so many secrets revealed, so many adventures across the light and across the darkness, along the history of the Realms. Riding his powers now grown almost endless together with his knowledge, and with their fame, and with the glory of their kingdom.  
And of their love.  
That certainty, beyond fame, and glory, and history, that simple, immense certainty was still enough. Enough to make his life worth living.  
So strong it had become along the years, and so inalienable, that now it tasted as innate to them as their godhood itself._

“...I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,  
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;  
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,  
and make pure and beautify it...”

_He wallowed for aeons in flawless stillness, until the well known whisper of a presence came to move softly the magic of his contemplation. His lids still closed, he welcomed the waft that brushed his lips bringing him back from his weightless journey. He sighed, he trembled in bliss, amazed again in front of the endlessly renewing wonder of that miracle.  
And he opened his eyes.  
“News from the reality you just woke me up into?”  
The smile shining an inch over his mouth brightened at once the rainy greyness around, and with his gaze he caressed those noble features that time had sweetened with a deeper wisdom.  
“Yes. Incredible news.”  
But those eyes, hanging on his face bluer than the Sea of Space, were talking quite another thing.  
He dwelt on their transparency, unable to turn his own away, he giggled.  
“...what?”  
And the warmness of that voice wove around them a mantle of timeless delight.  
“No matter how far our lives and feats have come, no matter how many tasks still lay ahead of us. All I need is right here.” Those raspy fingers, grazing his forehead with the same tenderness of the first time they did it. “I look at you and I see the same lovely face my heart keeps melting on since ever.  Time is being so gentle with you,... little one.”  
He stretched his hand out to grab that brawny nape and pull that head down, toward his mouth, so that those golden locks could tickle his cheeks.  
He smiled.  
“And with you too, my handsome.” Languidly, he moved a bit aside on the pallet to make some place for him. “Won’t you lay down here with me for a while and listen to the rain singing for us?” He whispered those words right on that mouth. “News can always wait.” And softly he bit those lips, chortling, lecherous. “Even the incredible ones.”_

“...(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,  
Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)”

***

Loki smiled tenderly on his sleeping god’s forehead, unable to detach his lips from it, basking at the sweet weight of Thor’s head peacefully abandoned on his shoulder. Oh, such a hard decision, the hardest ever, to restrain their flaming crave and through the flavour of their thousandth kiss to gently cast on his brother a sleeping spell. The most soothing and warming and enlivening among the hundreds he knew, in order to ensure Thor’s full recovery. Because this time he didn’t want to run any useless risk, this time nothing must be left to chance. And first of all, Thor had to be at his best. Through his uncanny sensitivity he could feel his cherished one gradually regaining his strength while sleeping that magic sleep of life; he could feel him dreaming the tender dreams he sent him to shield his soul as long as possible from the fated anguish that was meant to follow. Besides the lethal fight they were about to face against the darkest and most unpredictable forces in the known universe, he knew a crucial confront would have been inevitable between Thor and the All-Father; and he knew that confront might have turned out more devastating than any other.  
He also knew, however, that - once ended that last ordeal - letting their hunger for each other free would have been more impetuous, more ardent than ever; and that single thought erased from his head any concern, making him shiver with irrepressible anticipation. He smiled again on Thor’s quiet breathing, huddling up to him while breathing his skin, and hair, and dreams.  
“You know, my handsome?” he whispered on his beloved’s almost imperceptible snoring. “I feel so strong.” He rubbed his cheek on Thor’s forehead. “Stronger than I have ever been. So strong, and so completely conscious of... how much I love you. Trust me. This time, nothing. Nothing will stop us.”  
And for a bunch of minutes before yielding to a bracing sleep as well, with lucid resolution he reviewed in his mind every single detail of his plan.

_“How many souls did he promise to repay you with?” he asked, a cynical smile on his face.  
“Thousands,” answered she.  
“Oh. Thousands.” He grinned, raising his eyebrow. “Well, because I do not care about the destiny of any soul in any Realm...” His inscrutable gaze let no feeling show through. “...I can grant you more than thousands. I can grant you all of them.”_

The air stank.  
How disturbing. And ominous. Because, since the dawn of time and every day, the Realm of the Gods welcomed its citizens with the fresh fragrance of dewy leaves, and musky rocks, and golden waters, all mixed together in an unearthly blend.  
Not anymore.  
When they stepped into reality, standing tall in their armours on a peak near the city of Asgard, the heavy, lugubrious air saturated with that acrid stench of rotten corpses and souls almost broke their breathing. And the view simply killed any word in Thor’s throat. He woke up just a while earlier in Loki’s arms, feeling mightier than ever, eager to engage the final challenge that would have driven them to fulfil their written fate; they joked about the sleeping spell that broke their ardour up, again they had to fight to restrain themselves from yielding to that ardour and get ready instead, as soon as possible. They talked of strategies, of tricks, of all the odds and forces that might be involved in the battle; their long forgotten eagerness for fight, their unceasing, enthused gazing into the rediscovered awareness filling each other’s eyes while they prepared was enough to make them feel invincible.  
But now, in that unbearable stink twisting his bowels, in front of the dusty blackness swallowing the landscape, in front of the ashen grip that had already made part of the city crumble, a grievous sadness seized Thor’s face, while his soul was passed through by a deadly shiver. A never seen before clutter of floating shades coloured the skies with dark brown and violet and black, and the hundreds flying creatures carrying on their backs Hela’s doomed soldiers were squeaking, spitting black flames, and rising hellish whirlpools. On the whole land around, still hardly discernable in the thick fog, feral monsters moved relentlessly forward to the walls of Asgard, gurgling creepy. Hankering for blood, and death, and souls. A confuse rumbling covered any other sound, heavy black clouds pulsated from above all over the surface, as though that immense army of doom suddenly caught their presence and couldn’t wait any longer for the signal to attack.  
The grimy wind ruffled Thor’s hair while he, still frozen on the border of the peak and convulsively gripping Mjolnir’s handle, forced his voice out.  
“It used to be called the Golden Realm... and now, look at it.” His lips quivered with scorching anger. “Putrescence. Darkness. Chaos. All because of the mad blindness of a father who’s forgotten honour and compassion.”  
At once, Loki’s hand reached his one and squeezed it, resolutely. And his smile got lost beyond the horizon.  
“While you were sleeping, and dreaming, I also had a dream, my sweetest.” Oh, the blazing rage bursting up inside his sweet god’s soul, and through the tangle of their fingers now shaking his own too. “This is not going to last. For there is a different future meant for this Realm. And us.”  
Thor blinked, gritting his teeth, and moved his sight from one side of the plain to the other.  
“What are they doing? They are moving sort of... randomly, they don’t seem to have a leader.”  
“They have.”  
Slowly, he turned his head towards the rocks towering the city from the opposite side of the plain.  
“And you know who he is.”  
Following Loki’s look, Thor turned his head too. There, on the top, in a rumble of cracking light and smoke, riding a rearing Sleipnir, Odin appeared, gigantic, furious, Gungnir in one hand, the Casket of Ancient Winters in the other. The terrifying roar blasting from the All-Father’s throat shook the whole land and sky, making the two of them sway for a second. In the meanwhile, vague in the black mist, at Odin’s sides and back the mountains’ ridge started moving, sinister, and seemed to come alive, as if a huge, horrendous monster had been evoked from the depths of the earth. Thor and Loki half-closed their eyes, until they caught, emerging from the dust clearer and clearer, the hundreds silhouettes that made that monster ghost: an army of Asgardians, ready to fight on their old king’s behalf. At once, the clouds above growled more ominous; all the dark warriors on the land and in the skies raised their weapons as one and squashed untidily towards the All-Father.  
At the same time, as they glanced down inside the city from the top of the peak, they saw hundreds of warriors cramming towards the main portal and hailing to them rising their swords. That warmed Thor’s soul, even if a tide of vexation inflated his chest, for no possible distance could prevent him to feel the ruthless venom of his father’s gaze piercing his heart from side to side.  
 _“...But it’s up to you, Thor, to decide to what extent you are ready to push yourself in order to save Asgard. I am sure you understand what I mean.”_  
Only then he understood in all their clarity the words that Heimdall told him time before. As only then he had the doubtless certainty Loki was right saying the All-Father had no intention to retrace his steps.  
“He’s trying again to tame a source of power that never really belonged to him,” Loki whispered, and closed his lids for an instant, catching the hidden energies moving beyond the visible. He grinned, sarcastically. “He’ll see what I left hidden in there for him.”  
But Thor, panting his wrath on the invisible blade that chained his gaze to Odin’s, was thinking elsewhere.  
“His hatred,” he snarled. “I feel it in my bones. It is more biting than this fetid air itself.”  
Loki got closer to him.  
“This is your last chance!” they heard the All-Father shouting, rabidly, far from the distance. “Drop your hammer now and kneel before your father and king! Or burn forever in the frozen flames of Hel!”  
Thor spitted out a growl, leaning out of the cliff’s edge so impetuously that for a second Loki was afraid he would have fallen off.  
“Father!” Thor shouted back, making the whole valley tremble. “You know I will not!” His eyes blazed with fury and the veins on his neck pulsated dreadfully. “Open your eyes and take a look around you! Are you really going to take arms against your people? Do you really want to sentence Asgard to damnation?” He paused a second, his words echoed in the wind. “Stop this insanity before it is too late!”  
Odin’s only answer was to rear Sleipnir up, and roar like a feral beast.  
“It is already! Too late!”  
There, Loki could feel Thor’s heart almost exploding. He gasped.  
“Thor. Look at me, Thor.”  
As Thor did it, Loki flooded him with the wisdom of his eyes.  
“His era is ending, and even in his madness, he perfectly knows that. His hatred is chasing him. But no matter how ferociously, how insanely he may hate. Or fight. His time, as the ruler of this Realm, is over.”  
He grabbed both Thor’s forearms and quivered with elation when Thor, still breathing out sheer anger, grabbed his own back, boldly. He waited for a comforting smile of confidence to shine back on his god’s face.  
“And yours must begin.”  
Thor inhaled deeply and raised his hand to graze his cheek, softly.   
“No.” He slipped his fingers on his nape, under his hair, shivering at Loki’s little shiver. “ _Ours_ must begin.”  
Their eyes now locked into each other’s, glimmering with ultimate resolution, their capes fluttered in the wind and from the top of the peak their figures stood out haughty against the plumbean sky.  
“I’m looking forward to engage and end this challenge,” Loki gasped right on Thor’s mouth, drawing nigh to him so that their chests could touch. He snickered cheekily while, following his magic hint, everything in time and space stopped for a bunch of seconds. “For I’m not sure how long I can survive...” His breath slid on Thor’s neck, and chin, and lips, he shivered at the unbridled tension he felt burning so erotically pugnacious inside that glorious body. “...waiting for what will come next.”  
Trapped in that inescapable bubble of timeless sensuality, Thor simply smothered that impudent mouth with a rough, gushing kiss. Certain that his father could see how just only that kiss for an endless moment could drench the gloominess around with the glaring flavour of victory.  
And then he smiled, fierce, his gaze flashing with the indomitable flame of lightening.  
“Me neither.” His eyes never letting go of his brother’s, Thor secured Loki’s waist in his arm’s grip and raised Mjolnir to the rumbling clouds. “So. Let’s end this.”

 _“Not only we fixed the thorny problem of my beloved thunderer,” he grinned, ostentatiously sarcastic, rising Mjolnir in front of her eyes. “But also... the All-Father cannot rely any longer on the entirety of his people and warriors. Nor on their loyalty, or on their fear.”  
“What do you mean, trickster?” she hissed, almost losing her patience.  
“I mean.” He took a deep breath, holding back his annoyance. “Divide and conquer. It’s an old saying, never heard it? Odin will not be able to lead his war from inside the city, for – with my _totally unbiased _help - the All-Seer seized the core of Asgard.” He chuckled, gloating on the coils of innuendo curling around her. He calibrated his following words to ensure she could be hit through by their crucial meaning. “And, of course, the Bifrost.”  
There, a creepy smile of collusion appeared on her disquieting face. And her improbable eyes fixed in his.  
“The Bifrost.”_

Centuries later, tales, and books, and songs would have talked of those fighting days as of the closest to a new Ragnarok in the Nine Realms’ last millennia of history. _“It has been aeons since the last time the Asgardians fought against each others,”_ Heimdall’s words went, lugubrious prelude to those days of darkness; words that only then, when Thor and Loki laid their feet right before the gates of the city, revealed entirely their terrifying burden. Because that burden really meant the end of an era. Because that burden took on disquieting surreal shades. Because along with that burden, during those days of darkness, many glorious Asgardians from both the sides walked their last walk into Valhalla after being slain by their own brothers.  
But none of such considerations could find a place in Thor and Loki’s mind as they appeared before the gates of Asgard: all of a sudden, in front of them, for an unending bunch of seconds every creature, every warrior seemed to be frozen in a dreadful silence. They were panting as one, as one foretasting the enticing redolence of the forthcoming slaughter, and foretasting as one the most intimate _battle_ waiting for them once ended their task. Thor glanced at Loki, who smirked back at him with total confidence; and then he glanced at Odin, still far on the peak, and apparently not intentioned to move down. He inflated his chest and stretched his hammer out towards the skies, while at the same time the portal of the golden city opened.  
From the top of his peak Odin raised Gungnir and roared to the horde at his command.  
“Destroy them! Destroy the entire city! Destroy everything!”  
He didn’t move an inch from his position, but the massive Asgardian army at his back started rumbling down along the mountains’ ridges.  
“For Asgard!” Thor growled in turn, calling the mother of all storms to hit the land border to border. Again, an instant, his eyes searched for Loki’s, and when he saw them sparkling with the green of his charging powers he chuckled, he bashed the ground with all the strength he could let out through Mjolnir and shouted anew: “For us!”  
“For Asgard!” answered the rumbling legion of warriors that rushed out of the city rising a huge cloud of dust, ready to grant their lives to their fated prince.  
In a sudden rainfall of cracking lightning, the wave that Thor shook the ground with instantly wiped out the first lines attacking overland, and had them swallowed into the deep cracks that opened. At the same time, Loki’s magic fog thwarted the oncoming swarm above their heads; then, side by side, they hurled themselves into the chaos of the fight, wild beasts roaring their blood thirst together with the burning ardour that empowered their limbs. And the turbulent crowd of the Asgardians that came out from the gates followed them.   
As the fight exploded, just a confused, tumultuous maelstrom obscured the whole land while Thor and Loki, still back to back in the thunderous cloud of dust and blood, lashed out at everything coming against them, from every side, one with his hammer, the other with his daggers and his magic blades, unstoppable, heedless of the slashes hitting them both as well. In the unchanging atmosphere that surrounded them, they’d never know how long that battle lasted, it might be hours, it might be days, nor on how many frontlines it was fought. Multiform creatures, and misshaped monsters, and hideous ghosts, some wearing rough furs, some rotten armours, some just their scaled skin, tried and unleashed the most unthinkable weapons against them; some were gigantic and moving on their paws, some riding foggy beasts and winged snakes and horsey skeletons. But nothing they could do besides falling to the ground, slaughtered by the hundred, together with dozens Asgardians who chose to turn themselves against the two fated gods. No time to take a break, no time to care about the appalled look shouting in the eyes of those Asgardians an instant before they fell dead. Thor was faster than the fastest of the mountain lions, in leaps and strokes anticipating every attack, roaring, and gloating at every lethal blow his arm delivered; and Loki was an indomitable fury, enflamed by his newly reborn vigour, now stabbing enemies with his unerring daggers, now surprising them with any sort of magic, turning himself into the fiercest creatures and then getting back to his look, now here, now there, laughing in frenzy.  
Along the hours, along the days, everything ran amok and they fought unrelentingly: their mutual zeal, their burning eagerness made both insensitive to any exhaustion, to any wound, constantly linked to one another, whether they were fighting as close as one or being distant.  
Along the hours, along the days, Odin stayed still instead. Still on his peak, holding back a snorting Sleipnir, watching the chaos from inside an invisible shield Loki could sense, and not break down. A twisted grin on his wrinkled mouth. Watching. While his armies were mowed down with no mercy, the All-Father simply stayed watching. Just that. For all the time.   
Something no-one could have seen coming from the most powerful and rabidly conceited of all gods. Something that at some point made Loki doubtful about all the schemes he plotted.  
Gone lost any sense of time, of space, of everything else except the fight, at some point in that chaos Loki had a bunch of flying demons breaching his magic barrier and trying to hit the Bifrost, where Heimdall held the defence with a group of rabid warriors; and the black hole forming through the breach announced that Hela was about to break in. Yes!, Loki thought, and glanced down at Thor, “I need to get to the Casket!”, he shouted in fury, “I need Odin to get out of his damn shield!”  
“He’s just an old damn coward!” Thor growled back, without treating himself to a break in his bloodshed on the field, “I’ll make him get out!”  
He roared the names of Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, and from nowhere his chariot appeared at once in a blast of light: with a lightning quick leap he was on it, spurring the two snorting beasts in a wild run up across the dusty air, glorious and magnificent before Loki’s eyes that stared at him, glimmering from afar. So fast and so impetuous he flew above to the mountain’s top that Odin had no time escape the devastating blow of Mjolnir, that cracked and in a second shattered his shield; and nothing could do the demons he evoked, for at the same time Loki unleashed his own against them. An enormous black cloud grew all around the peak, wrapping and hiding everything; the last thing Loki could see from his position was Thor launching his chariot in a churning swirl and disappearing into it.  
No time to think, a rumble shook the skies from behind him. And she was there.  
Her simple moving blasted away half of the warriors fighting on the Bifrost, tugging them down into the gurgling waters below; it got so dark all around that even the profile of the city could hardly be discerned by then, the violence of the wind was terrifying, Loki himself had to struggle not to be hurled off the Rainbow Bridge.  
“Now open it!” she snarled, chuckling, right over his head. “Let us reach everywhere and have our spoils of souls!”  
“Time to time, my lady!” Loki stood between her and the last defence on the Bifrost, his eyes glistening with endless power, his lips trembling in a brazen grin as he could sense approaching in the mist, closer and closer, what no-one else could sense. At her hint of a jump, he just stretched his open hand out and blocked her. “I said. Time.” And snickered. “Turn around.”  
She did it, somehow disoriented, and splitting the fogs behind her emerged Thor’s chariot. And with a fit of pique she suddenly realized that Thor was there, in full power of his strength at Loki’s side, and not trapped in her dungeons.  
“Queen of the Doomed...” Loki sniggered at her, sarcastic. “You really thought... you were smart enough to trick the trickster?”  
Hela had no time to retort, as Thor darted with his cart right against her, forcing her to swerve, and then under the Bifrost, roaring.  
“He’s behind me!”  
From the same fogs appeared Sleipnir, running wild in mid air, Odin on him, the Casket still in his fist, about to open. Right after him, a chaotic throng of demons, drooling and grunting and yearning for blood. The All-Father growled, he reined in Sleipnir abruptly in the void and, while flinging blows with Gungnir  at Thor’s cart, he raised the chest right in front of Loki’s flaming eyes.  
“You will not live long enough to see the end of this!” His face was blackened by the fetid fog, bloodshot his only eye. “Neither of you!”  
Floating over their heads, Hela wavered in confusion, now glancing at Odin, now at Loki, now at Thor, enraged, and clearly unable to place her trust in any of them; Thor violently restrained his raring goats and held his breath, Loki gasped a snarl, burning with spree, for the energy he felt about to spread from the Casket directly into his own veins was overwhelming.  
“Do it then!” he shouted in rage against the All-Father. “Do it!”  
Before the appalled faces of Heimdall and his maniple, who didn’t dare to do anything else but witnessing the course of things, before the peeved frustration of Hela, before the seething eyes of Thor and Loki, the chest finally opened.  
A blast of blue light exploded from the inside, breaking the darkness with a dazzling flash, and Loki’s hidden charm was then released: a distorted mask of bewilderment seized the All-Father’s face, as he realized, too late, that the beam of light fatally aimed at his own chest. And passed through it in a second, to simply freeze what was left of his heart. The recoil was enough to unsaddle him and make him fall right on the translucent crystal of the Bifrost, so befuddled that Loki could call the prodigious box back to his own hand; meanwhile, Thor headed his coach towards him, stretched his arm out shouting his name and dragged him on board.  
As the Casket touched the palm of Loki’s hand, his Jotun soul took over, the outburst of power almost overcame him for an instant, and for an instant Thor froze in awe, hopelessly enraptured by the renewing wonder of his mutating skin. A single blink of his red eyes sufficed to Loki to wrap the chariot inside a magic shield, preventing Odin’s demons from attacking, and to throw them back into the darkness from where they’d been evoked. On the field below, in the meantime, his spell was doing the rest: in the woods burning iced all around the city, the trees, the bushes, even the grass took life, becoming frozen tentacles that suddenly snaked against the army of creatures still fighting to approach the core of Asgard. And carried out a massacre of them.  
Over the Bifrost, with Odin still at the mercy of disorientation, Hela yielded to her vexation and hurled at Heimdall’s Dome, destroying part of the main wall with one blow, taking down some of the defenders and throwing Heimdall himself to the ground. And then, gigantic, she tried to strike Thor’s chariot. Breathing as one, seeing as one, thinking as one, to Thor and Loki there was no need to talk; a knowing look was enough. Taking advance of the All-Father weakness, Thor raised his hammer and called the storm, Loki raised the Casket at the same time and, while he spoke magic words that no-one heard before, the web of spells he left dormant in Hel awakened all at once.  
Unleashed from their blended essences, the combined forces of ice and fire, of light and darkness, of thunder and magic made the skies burst in a sudden maelstrom.  
And from the abyss of damnation, for the Queen of the Dead came the final blow.  
She screamed, contorting herself while being snared and sucked into the lethal vortex, she shrieked like a thousand vultures, she struggled in vane.  
“Today you win, trickster, but remember!” Her rage resounded in her gurgling rattle. “No-one makes agreements with the Goddess of Death... just for the fun of breaking them!”  
Loki just sniggered, jeering.  
“Farewell, my lady!”  
And she disappeared into the depths of nothingness, swallowed up by the flaming iced chasm that gurgled for a while, creaked sardonic and resealed over the echo of her screams.  
“Watch out!” Thor shouted all of a sudden, catching a move from Odin out of the corner of his eye; but he let slip a chuckle, as he saw Loki had already trapped the old god inside a circle made of his own clones, each one carrying a cloned Casket in his hand.  
Panic, and fury, and derangement, and incredulity alternated on the hallucinated face of the All-Father, now deprived of any help, of any ally, even of any semblance of grandeur; but nothing could force him to give up, now more than ever, for his madness ruled him. He rabidly wiped out some Loki’s clones, that reappeared right away, driving him crazy, then he stroke the shield around the chariot with a first blow from Gungnir, aiming to Thor.  
“You are not blood of my blood anymore!”  
And then a second, aiming to Loki.  
“And you have never been!”  
The shield wasn’t even scratched, but Loki could feel that Thor’s heart was. He could feel the fight inside his soul, a fight between the awareness of the present lunacy and the memory of a glorious past, a fight between the calling of his heritage and the last echo of a son’s compassion. A fight so hard that prevented him from retorting to his father a single word. Loki could feel that. And for an instant, a lump choked his throat.  
But a third hit shook the shield and made them stagger.  
 _We do not have much time, my sweetest_ , he whispered with his mind, as warmly and gently as he could. _You know there is no other way._  
Gripping the Casket with both his hands, Loki stayed still, to look into the blue of his god’s eyes for the sign of approval he could not go ahead without: and Thor just nodded.  
“You will not dare!” growled the All-Father, foreseeing the inevitable, but yet not willing to believe it.  
Then, from the Casket glowing in Loki’s hands and from every Casket of each clone, a weave of icy strings wrapped the All-Father and in a heartbeat grew thicker and thicker, freezing him into a translucent sphere, a thousand times harder than diamond, a thousand times colder than death.  
“Now sleep the empty sleep of oblivion,” Loki stated, gravely. “Be locked into the void, until the end of time.”  
With a slight gesture, he ordered the sphere to lift up; he looked at Thor, who pointed Mjolnir at it, and then, together, they casted it up to the skies, the glazed core of a comet that hurtled across the dark leaving behind a trail of sparkling dust. Panting, in silence, they followed that trail with their eyes, until it vanished into the farthest, the most secret part of the space. That part of the space where a long time before, thousands and thousands years, the gods used to imprison those among them whose actions had grown so uncontrollable and mad to put the fates of the entire universe in jeopardy.  
Discreetly, almost religiously, because he felt the significance of that act, Loki lowered the lid over the Casket and over the twilight of an era; and, while his skin slowly regained its precious paleness, with a gentle blink he sent it back, safe and untouchable, into the dim inside its secret room.  
As the ancestral silence fell, the desolation on the battlefield mutely shouted all its devastation.  
Standing side by side on the flying chariot, their armours torn up, their faces and bodies stained with their enemies’ blood and with their own, Thor and Loki just stared at the lifeless landscape for an unending while, unable to force even a whisper out of their mouth.  
In the thick fog slowly dissipating, corpses and corpses, and shreds of corpses, scattered on the ground as far as the eye could see, petrified in the most bizarre positions. Not a sigh from the wind, not a blow from the troops that survived the carnage came breaking the freakish silence as though, after the end of chaos, what was left as a view for those alive were a herald to damnation, and not to victory.  
Then, at some point, Thor took a deep breath, he looked up to the skies and called the rain.  
Not a thunderstorm, not a squall.  
Just the rain.  
Sparse, at the start, then heavier and heavier; and that became the only audible sound in all the Realm, from one border to the other.  
The sound of the rain.  
The voice of the rain.   
A primeval, purifying rain that pelted down over the whole land, making the doomed carrions dissolve and be absorbed by the dampening soil, and leaving on the field only the bodies of the Asgardian warriors, all of them, had they fought on Thor’s side or had they fought against him.  
Little by little, on the rustling of the rain, the skies, the mountains, the forest and the moor began to clear, suggesting the presence of the daylight behind the livid clouds. On the cradling of the rain, little by little, Thor’s panting slackened, getting more and more relaxed, and so did Loki’s, while the tepid deluge soaking their hair, and cheeks, and limbs started melting away the blood and dirt; until they quietly bowed their head, as one, under a burden that only then they could feel clearly in its utter heftiness.

In Heimdall’s Dome, through the dust slowly settling on the floor, the usual shine was gradually awakening back to life the walls still standing. For a long, long while no-one inside the Dome, not Thor or Loki, nor the elders that gathered there, nor the All-Seer himself could utter anything. On the still smoking relics of that momentous trial, only silence could speak. Silence, so deep that almost hurt the ears. Silence, and the gazes of those present to seal that epic moment, mute gazes not yet free from the countless implications bubbling sinister now that the bloodshed ended.  
Heimdall stood in the centre of the room, holding his sword, impenetrable. Right in front of him and before all the others, Thor, staring at him implacable, a statue carved from the marble of pride itself. His magnificent body, his face, his arms and legs through the several wounds still bleeding were still talking loud of the most recent fight. Standing by him, looking the same, and carrying the same resolution in his eyes, Loki didn’t move an inch away from his side. Both breathing heavily, both sort of hanging on the wait of a revelation.  
“So.” Heimdall started after those that seemed centuries. “You are finally standing before your written fate, prince Thor.” He rose his head a bit, ideally addressing to the royal palace. “Too long the throne of this Realm has remained vacant.”  
Frowning his brow, severe, Thor inhaled deeply.  
“Not yet, All-Seer.” He spoke with unexpected graveness in his voice. “Too many glorious Asgardians fell fighting with honour, on both the sides of this blameworthy fight.” Despite his demure words, everyone in the room could feel that, unequivocally: it was already _the king_ , he who was speaking. “Our people need the time to mourn their dead, and we must grant them that time, before I can feel ready to celebrate and to accept the crown of Asgard.” At that point, gently, he put his arm around his brother’s waist, dragging him closer to his own flank, not lowering his sight for a single instant. “And when that day comes, let it be very clear, my throne will be his throne. And he will rule as my equal.”  
There, the long held back muttering among the Elders grew more resounding, until one of them took a step forward.  
“In you we trust, my lord,” he stated, bowing slightly. But the scornful gaze he then pierced Loki with was a stab to them both. “But him...”   
At once, with a growl of exasperation and before Loki could retort anything, Thor turned himself vehemently against the one who spoke, who jumped back just in time to dodge the blow.  
“We’ve just finished slaughtering each other and you still don’t have enough?”  
Burning with renewed rage he raised his hammer, ready to strike, when – pre-empting Heimdall’s move - Loki came between and grabbed his forearms, blocking him, firmly.  
“Restrain yourself, my sweetest.” He waited for Thor to calm down and lower Mjolnir, he smiled, locking his gaze straight into his brother’s. “These noble dullards will never be able to look beyond their biases, let them live on in their blindness.” He wouldn’t even give them a second look, all caught in flooding his sweet god with his most convincing argument. “There is a time to take action and fight, and there is a time to sit, restful, and think.” The alluring significance of his voice speaking those words. “About what you fought for, about what you lost and what you conquered. About the new present... that will make the future new.” And when he saw Thor’s nervous grimace sweetening slowly into a pale smile, he just smiled back on it. “Now... it is the time to sit.”  
 _And it is the time... to take some time for us_ , Loki’s eyes whispered under his spoken words, oozing sensuality, while the back of his hand, unseen, grazed Thor’s thigh.  
All of a sudden, no-one existed anymore under the golden dome, not the Elder who spoke, and not the others, not even Heimdall, no-one, but the two of them.  
And they walked out of the room in silence, without turning back, completely heedless of the nonplussed eyes following their steps.

***

 _Far ahead in time, among the futures.  
Among the countless possible futures.  
Or in the only one meant to be.  
His eyes closed, his body abandoned against the farthest offshoots of the Tree’s roots, he listened to the wind.  
He listened to the wind, and he listened to the rain.  
The desolation of the rain.  
The sobs of the rain, the mourning of the rain.  
Alone.  
His tears merged with the raindrops, under the shouting silence of a solitude that thanks to him acquired the colours of eternity.  
Solitude.  
And void. And non-life.  
No-one, nowhere.  
Not anymore.  
Nor ever.  
His weeping throes were tearing him apart, into the depths of ultimate desperation.  
Because now, among the countless possible futures or in the only one meant to be, what had been done could not be undone._  
“...I can grant you all of them.”  
 _Not anymore._  
“All of them.”  
 _Nor ever._


End file.
